Embedded Readings
A post I wrote for the moretprs list...
My newest experiment is Embedded Readings. Okay..so I made that term up...but I have been experimenting with a reading strategy and wanted to share it with you all. If you try it, I wouldlove to hear how it works with your students. I came up with the idea by combining three TPRS ideas: a) a skeleton story becomes a detailed story b) plan for success c) personalization
My first run was with a reading about Selena. (After we watched themovie) The final product was about 5 typed pages. I passed it out with explicit instructions NOT to turn the first page. (I had used a cover page with just the phrase "The Story of Selena".) On my signal theyturned the first page...and read the first page.
Page 1: a VERY short, simple outline in Spanish of Selena's life. (these are 9th graders in only their second year of Spanish)
Selena was a singer. She had a family. She had a husband. She was fromTexas...you get the idea. Maximum 15 sentences. Large font.Double-spaced. I knew that everyone would understand every word.
When I saw that they had all finished...we went to page 2.
Page 2: I had copied and pasted page 1 on to page 2 and then added twonew sentences for every sentence that was already there...tripling thesize of reading. I reduced the size of the font a bit.
Selena was a singer. Her name was Selena Quintanilla. She loved tosing. She had a family. She had a sister and a brother. She sang withher family. She had a husband. Her husband's name was Chris. Chrisplayed guitar while Selena sang. She was from Texas. She lived inCorpus Christi. Corpus Christi is a city in Texas.
You get the idea. I read page 2 aloud while they followed along. Ifthey couldn't picture the meaning of a sentence in their head, theygave me the "Stop" Signal. When I saw the signal, we clarified themeaning and went on.
Page 3: Copied and pasted page 2. Added two sentences or two clauses to each sentence.
Selena was an extremely popular singer of Tejano music. Her entire namewas Selena Quintanilla. She was mexican-american. When she was young,she loved to sing. She loved to sing songs by Donna Summer and otherpopular singers. She had a family. Her family was very close. Theyspent a lot of time together. She had a sister and a brother. Hersister's name was Suzanne and her brother's name was A.B. She sang withher family. Suzanne played the drums and A.B. played the guitar. Shehad a husband. Her husband's name was Chris. Chris also played guitarwhile Selena sang. He was extremely talented. He played all kinds ofmusic very well. She was from Texas. She lived in Corpus Christi.Corpus Christi is a city in Texas.
Because my classes are heterogeneously grouped so I strove to alternateeasily comprehensible sentences with more challenging ones. By thispage I needed paragraphs.
On this page, I translated a line alone and then we all translated a line together, chorally.
Page 4: Copied and pasted page 3, added, enhanced, pumped up those sentences to the next level.
On this page I read the sentences that we had already read on page 3aloud in Spanish ( I had put them in italics) and called on students totranslate the new sentences/clauses. Again, I tried to alternate easiersentences with more difficult ones as I added info.
Page 5: Final version. Copied and pasted etc. I did not use italics.Added etc. I asked students to read this silently, picturing eachsentence if they could. If they could picture a sentence, theyhighlighted it.
I know that it sounds tedious...but as Susie always reminds us..Successis rarely boring!!!! They really responded well to it...surprised thateven though each page got more challenging, that they were able tounderstand it. It was especially motivating for my "non-readers"because they knew that each page included an embedded version that theyalready understood.
The real secret?! I didn't come up with most of the sentences. Theycame from an in-class activity where they had written two lists: one ofthe things that they remembered from the movie (in Spanish) and anotherof their favorite parts of the movie (in English or Spanish whicheverthey preffered) I didn't tell them that I was going to use their listsso they were suprised and excited to see their own Spanish sentencesand their favorite parts of the movie in print.
This year I played with the idea a little bit more. After watching amovie, and doing several activities, I asked the students to do a 10minute "free"write about the movie (plot, characters, setting review,favorite parts etc). I used those writings to create a long reading(about 700 words). Again I copied and pasted the reading, but this timeI deleted two sentences for every one I left in...wherever it madesense to do so..leaving me a reading of about 250 words. Repeated theprocess eliminating sentences or phrases until I ended up with areading of about 80 words. And again until I got to about 50 words. Iprinted all of the versions and piled them up in reverse order to makethe embedded story.
(I hope that made sense...the first time I started with a skeletonstory and built a longer, more complex version. The second time I wrotethe longer version and pared it down to a sleeker, simpler version.)
The activities with the students remained the same...started with thesimpler version and moved to the more difficult, longer version)
Then I asked the students to do a second 10 minute "free"write, same topic.
WOWOWOWOWOWOWOWOW.
The difference was incredible. Writings doubled in length and depth.Crazy good. I asked the students to write to me in English about how itfelt to write the second essay. This student's response summed it up.
"The first time I had to really struggle to think of any words to say. This time the words were just there."
I can't wait to play around more with this...
with love,
Laurie
My newest experiment is Embedded Readings. Okay..so I made that term up...but I have been experimenting with a reading strategy and wanted to share it with you all. If you try it, I wouldlove to hear how it works with your students. I came up with the idea by combining three TPRS ideas: a) a skeleton story becomes a detailed story b) plan for success c) personalization
My first run was with a reading about Selena. (After we watched themovie) The final product was about 5 typed pages. I passed it out with explicit instructions NOT to turn the first page. (I had used a cover page with just the phrase "The Story of Selena".) On my signal theyturned the first page...and read the first page.
Page 1: a VERY short, simple outline in Spanish of Selena's life. (these are 9th graders in only their second year of Spanish)
Selena was a singer. She had a family. She had a husband. She was fromTexas...you get the idea. Maximum 15 sentences. Large font.Double-spaced. I knew that everyone would understand every word.
When I saw that they had all finished...we went to page 2.
Page 2: I had copied and pasted page 1 on to page 2 and then added twonew sentences for every sentence that was already there...tripling thesize of reading. I reduced the size of the font a bit.
Selena was a singer. Her name was Selena Quintanilla. She loved tosing. She had a family. She had a sister and a brother. She sang withher family. She had a husband. Her husband's name was Chris. Chrisplayed guitar while Selena sang. She was from Texas. She lived inCorpus Christi. Corpus Christi is a city in Texas.
You get the idea. I read page 2 aloud while they followed along. Ifthey couldn't picture the meaning of a sentence in their head, theygave me the "Stop" Signal. When I saw the signal, we clarified themeaning and went on.
Page 3: Copied and pasted page 2. Added two sentences or two clauses to each sentence.
Selena was an extremely popular singer of Tejano music. Her entire namewas Selena Quintanilla. She was mexican-american. When she was young,she loved to sing. She loved to sing songs by Donna Summer and otherpopular singers. She had a family. Her family was very close. Theyspent a lot of time together. She had a sister and a brother. Hersister's name was Suzanne and her brother's name was A.B. She sang withher family. Suzanne played the drums and A.B. played the guitar. Shehad a husband. Her husband's name was Chris. Chris also played guitarwhile Selena sang. He was extremely talented. He played all kinds ofmusic very well. She was from Texas. She lived in Corpus Christi.Corpus Christi is a city in Texas.
Because my classes are heterogeneously grouped so I strove to alternateeasily comprehensible sentences with more challenging ones. By thispage I needed paragraphs.
On this page, I translated a line alone and then we all translated a line together, chorally.
Page 4: Copied and pasted page 3, added, enhanced, pumped up those sentences to the next level.
On this page I read the sentences that we had already read on page 3aloud in Spanish ( I had put them in italics) and called on students totranslate the new sentences/clauses. Again, I tried to alternate easiersentences with more difficult ones as I added info.
Page 5: Final version. Copied and pasted etc. I did not use italics.Added etc. I asked students to read this silently, picturing eachsentence if they could. If they could picture a sentence, theyhighlighted it.
I know that it sounds tedious...but as Susie always reminds us..Successis rarely boring!!!! They really responded well to it...surprised thateven though each page got more challenging, that they were able tounderstand it. It was especially motivating for my "non-readers"because they knew that each page included an embedded version that theyalready understood.
The real secret?! I didn't come up with most of the sentences. Theycame from an in-class activity where they had written two lists: one ofthe things that they remembered from the movie (in Spanish) and anotherof their favorite parts of the movie (in English or Spanish whicheverthey preffered) I didn't tell them that I was going to use their listsso they were suprised and excited to see their own Spanish sentencesand their favorite parts of the movie in print.
This year I played with the idea a little bit more. After watching amovie, and doing several activities, I asked the students to do a 10minute "free"write about the movie (plot, characters, setting review,favorite parts etc). I used those writings to create a long reading(about 700 words). Again I copied and pasted the reading, but this timeI deleted two sentences for every one I left in...wherever it madesense to do so..leaving me a reading of about 250 words. Repeated theprocess eliminating sentences or phrases until I ended up with areading of about 80 words. And again until I got to about 50 words. Iprinted all of the versions and piled them up in reverse order to makethe embedded story.
(I hope that made sense...the first time I started with a skeletonstory and built a longer, more complex version. The second time I wrotethe longer version and pared it down to a sleeker, simpler version.)
The activities with the students remained the same...started with thesimpler version and moved to the more difficult, longer version)
Then I asked the students to do a second 10 minute "free"write, same topic.
WOWOWOWOWOWOWOWOW.
The difference was incredible. Writings doubled in length and depth.Crazy good. I asked the students to write to me in English about how itfelt to write the second essay. This student's response summed it up.
"The first time I had to really struggle to think of any words to say. This time the words were just there."
I can't wait to play around more with this...
with love,
Laurie
Laurie two questions:
1. On both free writes, did the kids have access to any of the readings that you had read together?
2. What about non-fiction, say a French movie by Truffaut? Do you think I could just write up new stuff, like we spin stories, since I don't have all the detail you had about the life of Selena?
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Hey Ben!
1. We did it both ways..it's been an experiment for us....the kids in two of my level one classes did not have any access to the readings during the first free writes. All they had was paper/writing utensil/brain :o) The kids in my colleague's class and in one of my classes used papers we had done during the "unit" to create theirs....for round one. When we asked the kids to rewrite AFTER the embedded readings, they did it alone.
2. I think it is worth trying with anything. I'd love to know how it goes. I've "embedded" a few things so far:
1. For Level 4's a short story (La Noche Boca Arriba....which I also printed right side up on one page and upside down on the other to help them understand the two perspectives)I started with the original version and pared it down 3 times.
I've also used articles from Reader's Digest following the same process..with much success.
2. Selena's story..Finding Nemo...Level 1 (2nd year)
I used the freewrites to build a basic outline, then added sentences to build 3 additional versions.
I have used the "build a story" format for creative writing with students for years...giving them an outline of 10-15 sentences and asking them to insert details between the sentences. Using them to create layers of readings with increasing difficulty is new...and I'm liking it.
I'm trying to collect feedback from others and compile it so we can all learn from each other!
with love,
Laurie
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It is really an intellectual treat to read your views on the blog. Keep sharing.
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I've been using this lately very frequently because my AP kids are reading about Peter the Great and the rest of the classes are reading about various folk heroes.
Maybe it would be possible to start a wiki page for stories, where kids could copy and paste in an existing story and add to it. Then the next kid could copy and paste in the next version, and add to that--the teacher could take the fourth or fifth version and make corrections if necessary, then cut it back down.
As a fan of limiting handouts or of at least really using the papers I hand out, I would love to figure out other ways to use these stories, once printed. Should kids re-write? add to the story? As we know, output isn't helping them at all. I like using handouts for individual reading, but I hate using them when it means that the piece of paper gets used only once. I also want to minimize my typing time.
Something that has occurred to me is that we could write a classroom novel using this approach.
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Michele of course Susie mentions in her Advanced Workshop about the guy (can't remember his name - I think it's East Coast) whose kids write a novel each year and they are published and sold by Carol Gaab and they are good. It's just Susie's idea of a class story embellished, embedded, if you will, to an extreme degree. Each year each class wants to outdo the previous class' novel. Susie knows the teachers name. I am going to be working with this idea this spring. Talk about buy-in. It's like your idea of students generating a story script but instead of doing a story you just write the novel instead together. I think I called it a reverse dictation. I talked about it as a blog entry (Susie Gem #10 or something, can't remember the gem #) - it was a few years ago.
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Ben (and Laurie!)
I did go to Susie, and she helped me with some outline ideas for a class novel a couple of years ago. I didn't set it up really well, and we ended up kind of slogging through and not totally finishing it, partly because I let about three different classes work on it. I think that now I would only have one class work on it, so that it didn't get pulled in different ways.
Now that I have seen how well embedded stories work, and how quickly they can expand from just five sentences to a couple of pages, I can see that if we had a fabulous story line, it would be easy to basically expand each initial sentence into a chapter or more.
The first of those novels that the kids wrote was the Shrunken Head one. It's wonderful!
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Michele could you expand on this sentence
...how quickly they (embedded readings) can expand from just five sentences to a couple of pages...
I am still trying to fully wrap my mind around the embedded reading process. Not that Laurie hasn't been perfectly clear, but I want to keep talking about it until it is perfectly clear to me. I don't want us to get 50 versions of embedded readings out there, either. There must be 50,000 versions of TPRS out there, and that isn't helping anybody.
Ben
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Ben,
Michele and I will be presenting Embedded Readings at NTPRS 11 this summer in St. Louis. (whooo hoooo!!) You can bet that we will be Skype-ing, blogging, texting, emailing, wiki0ing Facebooking and any other communication mode that gets created between now and then lol. Hopefully we will have things in order for a good written piece on the process. We'll keep you posted!! This entire Embedded Reading thing has truly become a collaborative effort..
with love,
Laurie
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Ben, it's really just another tweak on what TPRS does. Take the simple story. Embellish every sentence with a couple of deep background or explanation or twists within that part of the story. Do that again. Pretty soon your story has exploded. Mine sometimes get too long.
If you look here in February 2010 for the blog on oatmeal entitled "One way to create an embedded reading..." you'll see what I mean.
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