With the Common Core Standards (CCS), educators are thinking a lot about “close readings.” Close readings often are second or third readings designed to deeply understand ideas and meanings, while analyzing how those meanings are conveyed. Close reading is A LOT of work; they require A LOT of motivation. How’s a teacher supposed to DO THAT? And with third graders?

In a recent post, “Finding time for close readings,” Burkins and Yaris urged teachers to see close readings as a thinking activity that we routinely do, not just something we plan to teach at a single moment.

To us, close reading is reader action which involves the synthesis of a host of comprehension strategies, hence it is relevant in any teaching context. Because close reading is performed by the reader, it can be practiced within the context of all teaching structures. When we read aloud, we can reread and ask students to cite evidence and elaborate their thinking in ways that lead to new ideas about text. When students work with texts during guided reading, we can ask questions or lead discussions that require that students return to the story to carefully reread in ways that help them notice details that they didn’t see the first time around.

I think I can share an example of this kind of thinking about close readings.

Our science unit of study has been water and its properties. Last week, I wanted the students to get a sense of the concept of diffusion as a way for them to understand the concept of molecules. Molecules are difficult for third graders to really understand, and since diffusion is difficult to imagine without understanding molecules, I thought it might be good to combine a simple demonstration with a close reading to help them understand how molecules help liquids “mix themselves.”

To do this, I stole a demonstration idea from Walter Wick’s book, A Drop of Water. Rather than have the students read the book and look at the pictures in it, I simply reversed the order of events. To start, we dropped food coloring into a cup of clear water and took some time lapse pictures with our IPEVO webcam. Here are the images we got.

 

A few days later we clicked through the images forward and backwards several times (a close reading of images!), observed the changes, and tried to describe what happened. The kids came up with ideas like these:

• At first the green kind of burst like fireworks.
• The green spread out all over the cup.
• The green seemed to drop down from the dark green spot on top and up from the dark green spot on the bottom.
• The green looked almost like ribbons sometimes.

I introduced them to two word sets — concentrated/concentration and diffuse/diffusion — to help them explain what happened. “Spread out” became diffused. “Dark green” became concentrated. I was really pleased with how well this worked. Having the vocabulary emerge from their need to describe helped us understand why scientists need a specialized vocabulary: it helps them be more accurate and precise!

Then we asked questions that seemed to demand explanations. Here are some samples.

• How did the green diffuse through the whole glass so evenly?
• Why did some concentrated green stay on top?
• Why did the green look like fireworks when it first dropped?
• Why did some concentrated green sink to the bottom?

Finally, I told them we were going to read a piece of informational text that might help us answer some of our questions. This is what scientists do when they observe something that is puzzling; they go try to find out if anyone else has thought about those questions, too.

We read this short piece from Walter Wick’s book out loud, pencils and highlighters in hand to find the parts that might help us answer our questions.

 

I saw some puzzled eyes when we reached the word “molecules” (I had explained what molecules were in a couple of previous lessons, but our knowledge was not yet complete or sophisticated.) Then several children let out a collective “OHHH!” when we reached the third paragraph. Highlighters came out and pencils scratched. When we reached the end, I asked the children if they thought they knew the answer to any of their questions now. Of course, they could see that this helped them answer their question: “How did the green diffuse through the whole glass so evenly.”

I asked the children if they could turn their papers over and explain the answer to another student. That was fun to watch. They struggled and struggled with forming an adequate explanation. Many wanted to turn their papers back over because they forgot many of the details. Talking revealed to them the holes they had in their explanations.

Finally, I told them that they had experienced something a lot of readers experience, myself included; that is, when they find the answer to a question, they often experience an “Ah-ha!” and a sense of satisfaction. But, sometimes a reader has to reach another level, when you have to actually use what you know, and this requires careful reading and thinking. I told them we were going to re-read the part that would help us develop a more complete idea of diffusion so they could explain it to others. I mentioned that this is something that I do all the time when I’m trying to figure out how to explain something to them, or when I want to really learn something well.

We re-read the last paragraph very slowly, pausing at each sentence, sometimes even at each phrase, in order to check to see if we could explain what was happening. To help visualize what was happening on the molecular level, we acted out being molecules. We imagined how we would act if we added heat, took away heat, if we added green food coloring what would happen to that food coloring. It took us about 20 minutes to read and process the text, including reading the entire piece once and the third paragraph one additional time very slowly.

Based on their second explanation attempt, the children came away with a better understanding of how molecules act in a liquid, how diffusion happens, and why diffusion wouldn’t happen very quickly in a solid. In the process, they speculated on how evaporation occurs (“Maybe the molecules bang against each other so hard that some get knocked out of the liquid?”) and even got a rudimentary understanding of electrostatic bonding in molecules (“Water molecules act sort of like magnets. Sometimes they attract each other and sometimes they push each other away.”)

Are we all solid with these concepts? Nope. And I’m sure their understanding will “decay” quickly if we don’t talk about molecules again soon. But this close reading of images and text gave us a solid foundation from which to build.

Not bad for a days’ work. And Burkins and Yaris are right, “close readings” can happen anywhere and with anything.