Five close reading strategies to support the Common Core. I walked in to my first college class, Political Science 101, eager to learn.
For my inaugural college assignment, my professor asked the class to read the first three chapters of the textbook for the next class period. That night, I returned to my dorm room, determined to learn everything I could in those three chapters. I pulled out my textbook and highlighter. Growing up, that is what I always saw the “older kids” using when they read a textbook.
In my naïve 18-year-old mind, I believed that highlighters must have some magical power that transports the words on the page directly to your brain. How to do a Close Reading. Defining “Deep Reading” and “Text-Dependent Questions” In my English 10 class, I used to teach a lesson about satire through Dr.
Seuss’ The Butter Battle Book. To begin this lesson, I would tell students, “While this is, on one hand, a children’s book, it is also a satirical look at the Cold War era and arms races. Let’s talk about what you already know about the Cold War,” and doing due diligence to pre-reading activities, we’d begin listing everything we knew about the Cold War era. Then, we would read the book aloud together in its online format. Afterward, returning to pre-reading activity in its post-reading form, we’d talk about what we learned in terms of satirical writing: How did the characters represent the countries involved in the Cold War?