We’re going to be starting literature circles this week. You already have your novel and have started reading so let’s talk about reading strategies:

Reading Strategies

Using reading strategies is something that good readers do all the time, even if they’re not consciously aware of it. We choose different reading strategies for different purposes, and some of these strategies work better for individual readers than others do. For example, if you’re trying to understand a setting that you know little about, making connections between the setting in the text and other settings you’ve seen or read about before can help you understand the text better. As you read your first section, be deliberate about using some of the following reading strategies in order to help you with your reading comprehension. Think about the strategies that are most effective for you as a reader:

• Making Connections to the Text: As you read, think about the different connections you can make to characters, events, settings, and issues in the text. There are three different kinds of connections you can make:
  • Text to Text: Making connections to other books you’ve read, or to TV shows, or movies that you’ve seen. What does the plot of this book have in common with the plot of one of your favourite movies?
  • Text to Self: Making connections to your own experiences. How is the main character like or unlike you? How is the setting like or unlike a place you’ve been to before?
  • Text to World: Making connections to the outside world. How are the issues in the novel similar to issues you’ve seen reflected in the media or in the world around you?

  This will help you relate to the story even if it seems far removed from your own experience.

• Visualizing: As you read, use the clues from the text to help you picture what the author is describing so that it’s almost like watching a movie in your head. What does the main character look like? What kind of setting is he or she in? You can incorporate other senses to help you dive into the book. If you were inside the pages of this book, what would you be feeling, smelling, hearing, tasting? This will help you immerse yourself in the story.
• Talking Back to the Text: Have you ever tried watching a movie with a person who is so involved in the movie that they feel the need to talk to the screen? For example, “Are you nuts? Don’t go up in the attic!” You can use the same strategy (in a much less annoying way) by using sticky notes to talk back to the book. Record your reactions, questions, and observations on small sticky notes and place them next to the text you read. If you give yourself a goal of three or four sticky notes per chapter, you may surprise yourself by finding you’re more engaged with the story.
• Asking Questions: Another way to engage with the text is to ask questions as you read. Different kinds of questions will lead you to different levels of engagement with the text. A good tool for generating different types of questions as you are reading is a Q Chart.

If you match up the words along the left side with the words along the top, you have the beginning of different types of questions. The questions that would fall into the lightest colour boxes tend to be thin questions. For example: Who is the main character? The questions that fall into the darkest colour boxes tend to be thick questions. For example: Why would the author choose a boarding school as the setting of his novel?

Being able to generate effective discussion questions will be an important part of this unit, because you will participate in four group discussions where you will be expected to prepare and respond to discussion questions.

Discussion Questions

For the purpose of this unit we will talk about three different types of questions:

Matter questions – These are questions that deal with the text itself. “What is Harry’s reaction to being told he is a wizard?”

Personal reality questions – These are questions that focus on the individual reader’s experience, knowledge, feelings, and values that are brought to the reading of the text.  “When would you (if ever) confront a parent about something he or she has done?”

External reality questions – These are questions that deal with the world and other literature, and with the experience, history and concepts of other peoples and cultures. “To what extent does Harry Potter fit the archetype of the hero based on what you know about mythical heros? How is he the same? How does he differ?”

The very best discussion questions are a combination of at least two of the above question types because they generate the most discussion. For example:

“When is it right to go against the social and political structures of the time, as Harry does in defying the orders from the Ministry of Magic? What are the parallels to our own world?”

(You’ll notice that a rich question may technically be more than one question combined).

Book Club Format

• As You Read

• • • Divide your novel into 3 roughly equal parts. As you read each part, you will keep a Reader’s Journal. Your Reader’s Journal will be a record of what you read, as well as what you thought about what you read. It is informal and not meant to be a final “published” piece of writing. It will be assessed as evidence of your reading process. Don’t wait until the end of your first section to write your entire Reader’s Journal. Your Reader’s Journal is meant to show how your thinking evolves as you’re reading.

• Prior to Each Meeting

• • • You will submit your Reader’s Journal to your teacher.
    • You will generate four different discussion questions: one matter question, one personal reality question, one external reality question, and one combination question (e.g., matter + personal reality). (This can be written at the bottom of your reader’s journal).

• During the Meeting

• • • Your teacher will provide an opportunity for discussions for each of the novels, and will also provide you with a specific time frame and forum for sharing your discussion questions. You will then be given a specific time frame in which to respond to at least four questions from your book club members.
    • The purpose of these “meetings” is to allow you to discuss your thoughts in a focused and meaningful way in order to prepare you for the synthesis paper.

• After the Meeting

• • You will write a synthesis paper where you combine your initial ideas from your Reader’s Journal with the ideas generated from your meeting to draw some conclusions about what you’ve read so far.

Read

In this section, your focus should be on the narrative voice. (But you should also be looking for any information that supports your chosen essay topic.) See

Narrative voices can be classified as first person (I), second person (you), which is very rare and not present in any of your novel choices, or third person (he, she, it). However, there are further classifications:

Your rough drafts are due for peer editing today. If you don’t participate in peer editing, you don’t get the marks for process. You must submit your rough drafts to Google Classroom so I can see them. I’ll return them to you so you can keep working on them.

Credit support day!

If you are all caught up you will working on whatever you need to work on for any of your other courses or work ahead on English.

Remember, your rough draft is due tomorrow and the peer editing process is being marked.

Happy Halloween!

Please make sure you have completed the form posted Monday. Once you’ve done that, I’ll give you your books and I’d like you to divide them up into three roughly equal chunks.

Then we’re going to spend some time using something called the question formulation technique to generate questions you can use to gather information as you read your literature circle novels.

Please remember your rough draft of your essay of argument or persuasive essay is due Friday.

 

Test day!

You have a test tomorrow on rhetoric, logic, and the essay of argument and persuasive essay.

Today I’d like you to select your literature circle novels. Before you do that, I want to talk to you about both of the novels:

The Great Gatsby (writing)

Indian Horse (writing)

What is the Truth and Reconciliation Commission

 

Today is the last day for working on your essay in class. Please see google classroom and/or the calendar on our blog for due dates.

Let’s start by reviewing the writing process. See yesterday’s post.

Then let’s work on how to use “state, illustrate, explain” to construct an effective paragraph. Let’s imagine I’m writing an essay arguing in favour of using cell phones in the classroom.

In my first paragraph, I want to talk about how people argue that cell phones are a distraction.

State your point:

Many people argue that cell phones should be eliminated from the classroom because they are distracting. This may be true, but if we don’t teach students how to manage distracting influences like cell phones, then how will they learn to manage the distraction when they leave high school and have no one to ban their technology?

Illustrate your point:

I didn’t have a cell phone when I was in high school because, while cell phones existed, they were gigantic monstrosities about the size of a brick. It wasn’t a thing teenagers used. Yet I still managed to find ways to distract myself when I was in class. I passed notes to my friends. I doodled. I hid trashy novels inside my history textbook. Now I’m a teacher and I have a cell phone and I find it very distracting when I’m trying to mark student assignments or plan my lessons. No one ever taught me how to manage my device use because they didn’t exist when I was in school.

Explain how this illustration supports your point:

I’ve developed strategies now, but it took me time to figure them out on my own. That being said, I was lucky because I didn’t have a cell phone in university either. If I had access to a cell phone in university, after never having been taught to manage my technology use effectively, would I have done as well as I did? Now, I did mention that I still found ways to distract myself in school, but my teachers knew strategies for managing my distraction, so it was kept to a minimum. There will always be something to distract students. You can’t eliminate all distractions. What you can do is allow teachers the opportunity to use these distractions as teachable moments to ensure students will be more successful once they leave high school.

Notice how I also incorporated a counter argument?

Here’s what the whole thing looks like as a complete paragraph:

Many people argue that cell phones should be eliminated from the classroom because they are distracting. This may be true, but if we don’t teach students how to manage distracting influences like cell phones, then how will they learn to manage the distraction when they leave high school and have no one to ban their technology? I didn’t have a cell phone when I was in high school because, while cell phones existed, they were gigantic monstrosities about the size of a brick. It wasn’t a thing teenagers used. Yet I still managed to find ways to distract myself when I was in class. I passed notes to my friends. I doodled. I hid trashy novels inside my history textbook. Now I’m a teacher and I have a cell phone and I find it very distracting when I’m trying to mark student assignments or plan my lessons. No one ever taught me how to manage my device use because they didn’t exist when I was in school. I’ve developed strategies now, but it took me time to figure them out on my own. That being said, I was lucky because I didn’t have a cell phone in university either. If I had access to a cell phone in university, after never having been taught to manage my technology use effectively, would I have done as well as I did? Now, I did mention that I still found ways to distract myself in school, but my teachers knew strategies for managing my distraction, so it was kept to a minimum. There will always be something to distract students. You can’t eliminate all distractions. What you can do is allow teachers the opportunity to use these distractions as teachable moments to ensure students will be more successful once they leave high school.

Sentence Structure

 

We’re writing today and we will discuss the due date for the essay.

The Writing Process

The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.

Terry Pratchett

The concept that writing is a process is likely not new to you, but it’s important to review that process so that you can make your writing stronger and clearer.

Prewriting

In this stage you brainstorm, plan, and organize your thoughts. Some people like using a graphic organizer like a mind map, while others prefer to make lists, or even launch into full paragraphs. It’s very important at this stage to keep in mind that many of the ideas you come up with in your prewriting may never make it to your final draft so don’t censor your ideas. A “bad” idea that you end up discarding may lead to a “good” idea that you keep. This is writing as thinking. You are not writing for anyone else at this point. It’s fine if it only makes sense to you. Think about your audience and purpose. By the end of this process you should know, based on your audience, purpose and topic, what type of essay you want to write (narrative, persuasive, argument, or descriptive), and you’ll have some sense of the different kinds of proof you plan on using.

Drafting

Good writers know that their best writing comes after multiple drafts where they play with structure, refine ideas, and experiment with words and phrases until they find the best possible way to communicate their ideas to their readers. In this stage, you will create your thesis statement. Bear in mind that if you’re choosing to write a narrative or descriptive essay, your thesis may be implied rather than explicit. However, if your thesis is implied, then you have to be even clearer about your thesis. The thesis, even if not explicit, is the foundation for the entire essay.

Creating a Strong Thesis Statement

While the criteria for a good thesis statement may differ depending on the type of essay you are writing, it will still have the same general characteristics:

1. It will make a claim. A claim is different from an observation. An observation might be, “The manufacturing industry in Canada is in decline.” A claim, on the other hand, would be, “Since the manufacturing industry in Canada is in decline, the Canadian government needs to provide more funding for training to encourage workers to enter skilled trades.” This thesis is clearly more appropriate for a persuasive essay or an essay of argument, but a descriptive or narrative essay should still make a claim.
2. A good thesis will define the scope of your essay. Using the above example, you can see that the scope is defined. The writer will be talking about Canada, and specifically focusing on funding for training. This is important because if you don’t define the scope of your essay, you may not have enough evidence to adequately support your thesis. Think about what you are able to support and what you’re not able to support. If you find that your thesis requires proof or support that you’re not able to provide, then see if you can narrow or refine the scope of your essay.
3. A good thesis shouldn’t make the reader say “So what?” Another way to think of this in an essay of argument or persuasive essay is: Is your thesis arguable? If it’s unlikely that any reasonable person could argue against your thesis, then what’s the point in writing an essay? In a narrative essay or descriptive essay, this might be a little different because you’re not necessarily “arguing” anything, but you can still avoid the “so what?” factor by ensuring that the thesis you’re presenting avoids the obvious. Consider the difference between the following statements:
   1. I believe that overcoming hardships makes you a stronger person.
   2. While many would expect that the destructive relationship I had with my father might have set me on a path for failure, in actuality, I developed the perseverance, compassion, and resilience that led to my success today.

In addition to making a claim and defining the scope of the essay, the second statement, avoids the “so what?” factor by pointing out something surprising or unusual.

As you write your first draft, don’t be concerned with the mechanics of writing: spelling, grammar, punctuation, sentence structure. Instead, focus on developing your ideas.

Revise

The writing process is not, strictly speaking, a linear process. You will often cycle back through different stages multiple times as you work on different drafts of your essay. As you revise your draft, check for the following: Thesis statement: Do your paragraphs support your thesis statement? Do they stay within the scope you’ve presented? If you’re finding that the answer is no, then you either need to refine your thesis statement, or revise your paragraphs. Topic sentences: Each paragraph should contain a topic sentence that signals to the reader the aspect of your thesis you will be addressing. Sufficient support: Remember that different types of essays require different types of proofs (or support). While appeal to emotion may be appropriate in a persuasive essay, it is not appropriate for an essay of argument. Regardless of the type of proof you use, you must ensure that it sufficiently supports the point you made in your topic sentence. A good pattern to keep in mind is “state, illustrate, explain.” State your point, illustrate it with your chosen method of proof, and then explain how that illustration supports your point. Coherence: Make sure that each paragraph logically follows from the previous one. If that’s not happening, you may need to change the order of your paragraphs. Unity: Always check to ensure that your ideas are not veering away from the parameters you set up within your thesis statement. This is especially true in a narrative or descriptive essay where you may feel compelled to include details that you remember but that may not support your thesis.

Proofreading and Editing

At this point, you can start looking for errors in spelling, grammar, and punctuation. Reading aloud at this stage or any other stage of the revision process can help you focus more carefully on your work. Try the following steps: To proof for spelling… begin with the last word of your draft. read backwards word by word, checking each for correct spelling. To proof for sentence structure, punctuation, grammar, and phrasing… begin with the last sentence of your draft and read that sentence from start to finish to find any errors. read the second-last sentence from start to finish and note any errors. continue reading each sentence until you have reached the beginning of your piece of writing. To proof for overall tone and meaning… read from the beginning to the end, checking for meaning and flow. Correct your errors. Adapted from http://www.middlebury.edu/ and Think Literacy: Cross-Curricular Approaches, Grades 7-12

Using Feedback to Improve Writing

One of the reasons why it’s important to get another person’s feedback on your writing is because you know what you meant to say, but that may not come across in your writing. That’s a difficult thing to catch on your own. When incorporating feedback from your teacher and peers, don’t just focus on correcting the spelling and punctuation errors (proofreading), but pay attention to whether or not your teacher/peers were able to understand the main ideas you were trying to get across. Are there lots of places that seemed unclear to them? Ask yourself if you’ve overlooked important definitions or examples that would help improve the clarity of your writing (revising). If you don’t understand your peer or teacher’s feedback, then ask them if they can provide clarification. If you don’t understand their feedback, it will be difficult for you to make the necessary revisions.

I’ve given everyone feedback on their brainstorming. Please see Google Classroom.

Your instructions for today and your work, which is due today, are posted in Google Classroom. I’ll see you tomorrow.