I felt that it was time to an embedded reading, but decided to write one that was non-fiction.  Hmmmm…it was not hard to create…but working with it required some tweaking!!

Usually I create an embedded reading one of two ways:

a)      a)   I build the layers from writings (journals, 10 minute writes, group stories) that the students have written.

b)       b)   I create a story from suggestions of stories that students have given me revolving around structures that I have chosen. 

This time I started with an article about the miners trapped in Chile.    The article was very long (8+ pages printed in teeny tiny font!!!) but contained a ton of info about these men.    I also wanted to emphasize “son” (they are) and get some serious reps in!!

So the first page was a list of simple sentences…two to three words each….about the miners.  

Son chilenos.  Son hermanos.  Son amigos.  Son trabajadores.   (they are men, they are brothers, they are friends, they are workers)  The second, third and fourth pages added additional information gleaned from the article.   The “son” sentences served as themes for the paragraphs.

The plan was to read the first page and identify any unknown words (there were only 3 or 4).   Then we would go to the second page, look for cool details and discuss…do a little circling…and see if we had time to go on to the third page. 

Seemed well-organized.   

Yeah..well…it flopped.

Not horribly.  No one fell asleep.  No one complained.   But it draaaagggggggeeeeeeddddddddd.  

Ok…back to the drawing board!!!

I realized that my students were totally unconnected to the material.  Even though we had been looking at and discussing some great pictures of the miners and their families…even though we had written letters to the miners and their families (which actually turned out to be a great activity once we made it clear to all of them that we were writing to the Chilean MINERS not the Chilean MINORS ..I’m not kidding!!!!! Tee hee .  I do love teaching…it’s a surprise every day.  :o)  )

But the connection just wasn’t there.  Sooo…………………

We tried again with another class.     This time let the reading be.   We asked the class to help me to write a letter to the folks in Chile.   We asked them to brainstorm nouns and adjectives that identified and described the people in our area so that when I send the letters, the recipients would know something about who sent them.     We created a list:  trabajadores, familias, campesinos, agricultores.  Some were words they knew well, some they needed reminders of, and others….they gave us English and we gave them some killer words in Spanish (Tim, my student teacher rocked this activity!)    We did this in two different classes.

The next day we started by showing them the paragraph in my cover letter that I had written from their ideas.  Using ‘son” (they are).   Yup…you guessed it…now they were interested.

Next step…the list describing the miners.   We compared the two groups…alike?  Or different?  The connection grew.  I know…..it doesn’t SOUND like a big difference.   But it LOOKED and FELT like a huge difference.  A totally different lesson. 

We created another layer…..a level of difficulty between the original sentences and the second page (now the third page) because the leap seemed too big.  That helped too. 

Next we created a grid with the names of the men mentioned in our article (17 of the 33).  On Monday we’ll read the second and third pages and fill in the grid based on those pages.    The grid contains a square for each miner.   It is our hope that our students, through the reading, will begin to see the miners as real men with real lives, real families, real feelings.    And we’ll let them know that right up front.

Lessons learned:

Get their input in order to connect them to the reading.

Connect the characters in the reading…real or fictitious to characters that they know…

If the information is new, have a purpose for the reading…other than to “just” read it.  

Make sure that the difficulty level doesn’t jump too quickly.

Don’t be afraid to go back to the drawing board!!

With love,

Laurie