Professional Reading One- Closing in on Close Reading

Share three pieces of academic or professional reading and explain how they and other sources helped your form hypotheses about aspects of teaching that might contribute to current patterns of learning. (WFQ 7)

Professional Reading One- Closing in on Close Reading By Nancey Boyles

See text here

Summary: This texts looks at the key ideas of close reading. Student being able to read the text closely focussing in on key vocabulary, ideas and asking questions as they read. It states "...Close reading can't wait until 7th grade or junior year in high school. It needs to find its niche in kindergarten and the years beyond if we mean to build habits that will lead all students to deep understanding of text."

Reading this article was interesting here are some of the main ideas I learned from it. 

• Students who have close reading experience of challenging text no matter if they are struggling readers or not gain more proficiency. 
• Close reading is about uncovering the many layers texts have and it often requires repeated reading. 
• Focus on the text itself and not is wider world connects allows kids to connect with the key messages and develop word and sentence knowledge. 
• Unpacking words at each stage of reading helps develop over all text awareness. 
• Short texts can be useful for this as they provide an opportunity for more learners to engage with the same text. 
• Students summarising in their own words is ore useful for comprehension development then quoting directly from the text. 
• Students should be the ones to ask questions of the text, however teachers must be ready to model and support development of questions.
• There is a table of question that I think might be very helpful to me. 

What are my thought after reading this text? 

As a teacher I still believe that wide reading is incredibly important and pervious inquiries I have done support that fact that the more you read the better you get. However this as made me question how much text I should explore in my group teaching sessions. Could we look at smaller sections of text? I also wonder if I do too much for kids in terms of questioning. How can I get kids asking more questions? I wonder if providing question ideas would help. This text had a very useful table that has ideas of questions and parts of texts to explore. My other question is how challenge can the text be especially for my target group and can support such as audio be used to bridge the difference or will this limit children's learning of decoding strategies?