Teaching Strategies
Accordion Books
An accordion book is a unique space that operates outside of single assignments or the Writer’s Notebooks that students keep and write in daily. See the resource section for a helpful website that contains suggestions for how to set them up with students. The accordion books would be a place where I could have students do a lot of their draft thinking during our outdoor observations.
Close Reading
This is a procedure in which students engage in multiple readings of a text or part of a text in order to pay attention to key sections and improve comprehension of what they read. For many prose and poetry texts, we will do an initial read of the text and use questions that I have curated in order to get students to revisit parts of the text that are significant and merit closer attention. I would curate a list of questions for us to unpack both “The Turtle” and “Blackbird.”
Journaling
This is a term that can have different meanings, so it important to spell out in specific terms what I mean in the context of this unit when using the term journaling. For the purposes of this unit, I will have students journaling in very different ways. My main goal when students journal is to get kids outside and noticing using different prompts for students to organize their thinking. As you can see from the various activities, they will be asked to look for different things in different ways while outside. Part of my curiosity in teaching the unit for the first time will be seeing what they respond to and what they do not to refine the unit for future years.
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