Digging Into the Declaration of Independence

We have begun our unit on the Charters of Freedom (the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, Bill of Rights, Virginia Declaration of Rights, and the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom).  We discussed the Declaration of Independence in our previous chapter, but we often have to review the details and meaning of the document.

In the spirit of review, I'm combining a couple of my old posts that have inspired me to combine reading comprehension strategies in this unit.

First, Close Reading.

I find that you can copy the text and have them annotate, or you can use page protectors over the text and use dry erase markers to annotate.

Second, textmapping.  This is similar to Close Reading, but it has the students annotating together and all the pages are copied, taped together, and laid out so students can view the entire selection at once.

I made a PowerPoint that goes into detail on this and other nonfiction comprehension strategies.  You can pick up a free copy by clicking here.

Some suggested resources for reviewing the Declaration of Independence:

This is a magazine similar to Time for Kids, but it's all about certain subjects (the Declaration in this case).  It's not free, but it's worth a look.  Check it out by clicking here.

You could do this with just about any book, but it definitely works best with nonfiction.

Do you have any books or resources for teaching The Charters of Freedom?

Close Reading in Social Studies

I've been reading a great book called Building Literacy in Social Studies: Strategies for Improving Comprehension and Critical Thinking by Donna Ogle, Ron Klemp, and Bill McBride.

In a section of the book called "Supporting Struggling Readers", the authors write that "The more students read on the same topic, the more likely they are to move from novice to expert ways of thinking.  Therefore, students need to be surrounded by more rather than less material on the topics being taught."  They go on to say that you need texts of three different levels: simple, instructional, and advanced.

This led me to think of a reading strategy called Close Reading.  If you're familiar with text complexity and Close Reading, you know it is a method for increasing reading comprehension.  Many teachers use it in the core subjects in addition to reading class.  The following graphic is a summary of the steps of Close Reading by Tracy Watanabe at her wwwatanabe blog.

On a recent trip to the Library of Congress (LOC) with my friend from One Teacher's Take, I picked up some great kid-friendly texts to support my Social Studies curriculum.  While reading the books together, we thought they would be perfect for some Close Reading!

Two books that would support students during our "5 Documents of Freedom" unit:

These two books would be an example of the "simple" level of texts.  It introduces and explains the concepts in simple text with many pictures to support all levels of readers.

What about the instructional and advanced levels?  Do you have any examples of texts that would work for a Close Reading for these levels?