From text to table to text

It's funny when I start doing something in my class that I think is really working, and I get really excited about it, and I want to write about it, and then I realize that someone else already has. The cool thing is that the people who did, Levine and McCloskey say that what I'm doing is a best practice. The not as cool thing is that if I'd just finished reading their book that I've been toting around with me forever, I would have figured this out a lot sooner and been doing it in my classes.

So here's the thing that's been working in classes for us in the last couple of weeks (that I now know is a Best Practice (I like labeling that with capital letters because it makes it seem much more official). I'll try to post some pictures of student work if I remember to pull out the camera when I get back to work on Tuesday.

I call it "from text to table to text." And here's the thing. I have to preface this by saying that I hate graphic organizers. I don't hate them as a teaching tool, but I hate them for my own personal use. I skip over graphs and diagrams in books that I'm reading. I can't remember the last time I willfully pulled out a paper with a bunch of funny boxes on it to help organize my thinking (and I'm wondering how many of you do?) or my understanding of a reading. Yet, they seem to work with my kids. Sigh.

The text: I choose a text related to the topic we are studying and at the appropriate language level for the students. Two examples this week were a text on symbols of the United States government and the branches of the United States government.

The table: I design a graphic organizer that will correlate with the information in the text but that also requires the students to add their own thoughts into the mix. This is important. I want the kids to not only regurgitate the information from a text that they have read, but I want them to make a personal connection with it. For both of the above examples, the students had to find information in the text to fill out the chart. For the branches of government text, they had to tell me who is in the branch, what the branch does, how many people are in the branch, and where the branch is (which building). For the student part of the mix, I asked them to think about something that we had done in class that was like the duties of that branch, and I gave them a sentence starter so that they could show me they understood the connection. So, for example, we had in our table, "The Legislative Branch makes laws." I gave them the sentence starter, "In our class, we were like the legislative branch when we ____________." and had the kids fill in the rest from an activity that we had done that week.

The text again: Once the kids have filled in their table from the text, we then use a paragraph form to turn their table back into writing. For the branches of government activity, I modeled the first paragraph for them using the information from my chart on the executive branch. Then, I had the students walk me through the second branch together using that form. Then, the students had to take the information from their chart and the paragraph form to independently practice creating their own paragraph.

So it's a Best Practice. Good for me. Better for our students, though, that we are finding a way to get them to do extended academic writing despite the fact that they are level 1/2 writers.