Secrets and Songs: Deepening What Children See in the Texts They Read

[Notes from Mary Ehrenworth's Keynote]

Looking to Write by Mary Ehrenworth
Good and Bad Drivers in Education by Michael Fullen

What does close reading look like at different levels that also helps kids to fall in love with reading?

Think: What does it make you think and feel?

Methods for raising levels about text-based conversation.

Questions to think about:

• How can we teach students to see more in the texts they encounter?
• How can we innovate so that this teaching is engaging, intellectual, and joyful?
• What methods increase transference?
• What kinds of texts might we incorporate?

You get out of reading what you bring to it. Ex: Mary was completely bored at the baseball game because she doesn't know how to read a baseball game.


Guernica by Picasso

1. Notice what there is to be noticed. What do you see? Look at the characters. Name out what you notice about each character.
2. Look across the whole sense and try to make sense of it 
Develop an idea, then try to support it with evidence from the text
"Point to the part of your story where that happens."
3. What is it starting to be about? 
Develop an idea about the whole text, supporting with text evidence
Ex: Maybe it is showing that war destroys people. Also, it might be about...



"Wings" by Macklemore


Read lyrics with a partner and retell what it is about.

Before we listen to the song, make a plan for what you might listen to.

Some Technical Vocabulary for Things You Might Notice...

Music	Text
verse chorus pitch movement theme vocals, piano, percussion temp dynamics	stanzas imagery symbolism repetition perspective theme  tone  structure

Listen and take notes:
MY NOTES: symbolism: flying so high (Jumping for net/getting out of bad situation)

Stopped after a minute, and had us turn and talk

As we finish listening, mark off places where the tone changes.

Going back to the poem, when does the author shift tones? How does that effect meaning?

Resources/Research:

• Interrupted Reading (Donna Santman, Shades of Meaning; Lester Laminack, Learning Under the Influence of Language and Literature)
• Prompted partner talk (Lucy Calkings, The Art of Teaching Reading)
• Prompting, feedback, practice (John Hattie, Visible Learning for Teachers)
• Deepening reading practices (Robert Scholes, Protocols of Reading)

Some Instructional Methods:

• Alerting readers to notice what there is to be noticed
• Developing some expert vocabulary
• Composing text-based arguments
• Introducing new hard intellectual work in accessible and engaging texts
• Comparing and contrasting across texts to "see more"
• Layering complexity as readers learn to "see more"