Fantastic Metacognition in a Whole Group Lesson

When my second grade teacher from my internship at W.D. Hartley Elementary School in St. Augustine told me in 2004 that Mosaic of Thought altered her methodologies in teaching reading, I didn't know what she meant. I remember thinking, All right, find who wrote it, and purchase it because you will probably need it later. I remember reading it a few years later and admiring it, but I did not implement Ellin Keene's philosophy until this school year. Does that sound right?

For this year's students, YES! I have adopted a new approach that generates a great deal more excitement, BUT... I feel like I could have done this earlier and benefited so much more.

It was over the summer when I thought about the things I despised the very most in my classroom, things that generated inward groans that I could see written all over my students' faces. It did not take me long to think about how much I despised assigning comprehension questions 1-5 at the end of the story every Tuesday. Some of the questions were repetitive, tedious, and exhausting for my students, especially when all presented in one sitting. So I thought of how I could make comprehension more tangible and make it seem less like work, though they would be working quite a bit harder because we would be focusing on higher-order questions.

Today, I presented a very interesting question to my class. Before they approached the meeting area, I told them to get six Post-It notes, their reading response journal, and their reading textbook. We opened to Dear Mr. Winston in our Macmillan Treasures textbook and  reviewed a few of the skills near the end of the story (about base words, affixes, inferences, and plot development). In the midst of that, I showed the class this:

I then stated, "Using your six Post-It notes, be a reading lawyer. You know how lawyers must present a great deal of evidence? I want you to find six pieces of evidence that prove to Your Honor, me, that this story has a  sarcastic tone." They understood exactly what I was asking of them and produced THIS...

The "evidence" they were presenting was AMAZING. I loved the tone of their Post-It notes, even. After school, I put this chart together so tomorrow, the class can see how divergent their thinking was during this lesson. 

What evidence shows that Dear Mr. Winston was written using a sarcastic tone? The categories your Post-It notes fell into were...

• The Blame Game!
• Sarcastic Illustrations! 
• Suspicions!
• Talking About What Mr. Winston Does NOT Like!
• Rude Humor!
• Repetition!

This one lesson incorporated a great deal of metacognition and most certainly got my students thinking on a higher level. These were the Florida Sunshine State standards addressed in this one sitting: 

LA.4.1.7.1/LA.4.2.2.1/LA.4.6.1.1: Analyze text features. 

LA.4.1.7.3: Make inferences. 

LA.4.1.7.3: Formulate questions. (When the class shared their notes with one another, I certainly heard them asking questions to one another.) 

LA.4.2.1.2: Analyze characters. 

LA.4.2.1.3: Analyze the author's choice of language. 

LA.4.2.2.3: Chart, map, and summarize. 

Personal standards:

• My students found details that supported a claim. 
• My students turned back to specific points in the story, marking page numbers on their Post-Its. 
• They looked back throughout the entire story to locate their details, not just part of the story. 
• My students were most certainly not bored. 

I am grateful to be a stronger teacher than ever (I believe, anyway) who is ECSTATIC to teach reading for the 2011-2012 school year.