LESSON PLAN:
Previewing Text and Visual Features ■■Preparation Learning Objective Students will be introduced to history and social studies while they learn to use text and visual features. Pacing 45–90 minutes Suggested Readings “What Is History?” by Jim Bartlett “The Branches of Government” by Achieve3000
Lesson Overview In this lesson, students are introduced to history and social studies while they learn to use text and visual features. Students warm up by piecing together text clues from, and making predictions about, the social studies text they will read. This activity primes students for receiving direct instruction and modeling in using text and visual features as a strategy for previewing the text before reading and for finding information. Next, students apply this previewing strategy when they complete the 5-Step Literacy Routine with “The Branches of Government,” an article about the system of checks and balances in the United States. The lesson closes with a whole-class wrap-up discussion and the vocabulary journal process using new terms learned in this lesson. This lesson can be extended using the suggestions at the end, including analyzing photos and creating the front page of a historically accurate newspaper.
Do Before Teaching 1. Photocopy and cut out the sentence strips from “What Is History?”, one for each student. (It’s fine if there are duplicates.) 2. Have student vocabulary journals ready for this lesson.
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Achieve3000 Lesson Plan
Previewing Text and Visual Features
■■Teaching Routine Before Reading Introduce Lesson and Key Vocabulary (5–10 minutes) Extra Support Allow ELLs to use a bilingual dictionary and/or to confer with classmates who also speak their home languages to assist in interpreting their sentence strip, as needed.
• As students enter the classroom, give each a sentence strip from “What Is History?” Tell students that each strip contains a line from an article. Tell students to walk around the room, sharing their text clues and talking with one another about what they think the text will be about. Encourage students to read the lines aloud to one another. • When students are ready, bring the class together and ask for predictions about the text based on the clues they shared with one another. As a group, develop a one-sentence prediction statement that uses this structure: “We think the text will be about_______because________.” • Write this so it is visible to all students. Students should surmise that the text provides information about social studies, history, and historical events. Tell students they will read the text later in this lesson when they can find out whether their predictions are accurate. Provide Direct Instruction and Modeling (10–15 minutes) • Explain that skillful readers don’t just jump into reading the first sentence. They preview the text before reading, quickly scanning the title, any subtitles, any photos and captions, and any other text or visual features, to get an overall idea about the concepts in the text. Previewing involves thinking about what the various text and visual features could mean and how they might relate, which is often all the reader needs to do to have an idea of what the text is mostly about. The goal of previewing text and visual features is to activate prior knowledge about the ideas in the text so that the reader is well-prepared to read it. Previewing helps you to get your mind warmed up and to begin to know what to expect from the text. It will also help you better understand the text and remember more of what you read later. • Project the article “What Is History?” so that it is visible to all students. Tell students that you will use the think-aloud technique to demonstrate how skillful readers preview a text before reading. A sample think-aloud follows for your reference.
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Achieve3000 Lesson Plan
Previewing Text and Visual Features
Sample Think-Aloud First, I’ll read the title to get an idea of what this passage will be about. The title is “What Is History?” That’s interesting—it’s almost like the title is asking me a question. I’ll try to answer it: History is a bunch of important stuff that took place a long time ago. There are a lot of famous people in history, and we learn about them in school. Next, I’ll study the photograph and its caption. That looks kind of like an old church. When I roll my cursor over the photo, a caption pops up. It says, “This photo of the Alamo in San Antonio was taken around 1922, 86 years after the famous battle there.” That’s kind of what I was saying: History is full of important events, like the battle at the Alamo. Next, I’ll scan the article to look for subtitles. Subtitles are like titles for each major section, so they can give me the big ideas in the text. The first subtitle is “You Are a Historian.” That makes me think that maybe anybody can study history. Or, maybe it’s saying that there are certain parts of history that I know particularly well. I’ll see whether the next subtitle can give me any extra clues about this article. The next subtitle is “What Historians Do.” That’s good—I bet this section will tell me about a historian’s work and what kinds of questions he or she tries to answer. The next subtitle is “History and the World of Social Studies.” I take a social studies class in school, and we definitely learn about history, plus some other things. This section will probably be about how history is one part of a bigger subject area—social studies. I also notice that this article contains some words in italics. I can see that why, how, who, what, and when are in italics. I bet that means these words are important. After having previewed the title, photo, caption, subtitles, and italicized words, I think this article will be a good introduction to history. It might make me think about history in a new way, and it will probably explain what historians do to understand the past. (Write your prediction statement so that it is visible to all students.)
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Achieve3000 Lesson Plan
Extra Support Preteach difficult vocabulary, idioms, and figurative language as needed, based on the proficiency levels of your students.
Extra Support • Circulate while students work, prompting them with reminders and questions such as the following: – Remember to preview the article’s text features before reading. – How would you summarize the text based solely on the title, photo, caption, subtitles, and dictionary? What is your prediction statement? – What questions do you have so far? What is confusing? Are there any vocabulary terms that are unfamiliar? • While most of the class is engaged with their article and the 5-Step Literacy Routine, you may wish to provide additional small-group or individualized instruction based on student needs and your own instructional goals. Such instruction could include reteaching the lesson strategy by presenting it in a different way using one of the Lesson Extensions or working on a particular state standard or skill. The reports in the Admin section of the Teacher’s Edition will provide the data you need to make those types of instructional decisions. We recommend that you never work with small groups larger than five students.
Previewing Text and Visual Features
• Next, have students follow along silently as you read the full article aloud, modeling fluent reading. This time, do not stop to think aloud. After reading, discuss the predictions you made when you previewed the title, photo, caption, subtitles, and italicized words. Were your predictions accurate? Did your predictions differ from the text? In what way? Remind students that the goal of this activity is not that they should accurately guess the subject of the text; it’s to activate their prior knowledge about the ideas in the text so that they are well-prepared to read it.
During Reading Student Practice (15–25 minutes) • Next, have students work independently to apply their learning using the 5-Step Literacy Routine with “The Branches of Government.”
The 5-Step Literacy Routine 1. Before-reading Poll — Brings students’ prior knowledge into the classroom as they make connections and express opinions about the topic of the day. 2. Article — Students derive information from nonfiction articles differentiated to their levels. Repeated exposure to vocabulary and embedded strategy support enables all students to participate in classroom discussions. Access to grade-level text and activities ensure that students have frequent interactions with grade-appropriate complex text. 3. Activity — Students demonstrate successful close reading of text by responding to text-dependent questions that require higher-order thinking skills. 4. After-reading Poll — All students express their opinions again, based on the reading they did that day, with teachers requiring students to provide evidence for their opinions. Teachers then facilitate discussion and debates in the classroom. 5. Thought Question — A critical-thinking activity guides students to write in more formal scenarios with the intent to either argue or inform about a situation or narrate an event. After mastering the concepts at reading-level, students have the opportunity to complete the same Article and Activity at grade level. They can also review their Poll results from both before and after reading and reflect on how their readings and experiences affect the evolution of their opinions.
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Achieve3000 Lesson Plan
Extra Support • Tell Spanish-speaking students that the English word history is cognate with the Spanish word historia. Pronounce the English word history, then pronounce it phoneme-byphoneme and have students mimic your full-word and phoneme-byphoneme pronunciations. • Ask for a volunteer to provide another way of describing the term history. • Have another volunteer read the dictionary definition of the term history, in both English and in the student’s native language. • Ask students to name examples of historical events. Provide examples from students’ home cultures (e.g., Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire, Mexican war of independence).
Previewing Text and Visual Features
After Reading Whole-Class Wrap Up (5-10 minutes) • When all students have completed the 5-Step Literacy Routine (or at least the first two steps), bring the class together to review the lesson, discuss any questions students have, and provide any reteaching that is needed. Ask students whether the predictions they made before reading were accurate. What did they predict that was inaccurate? Make sure students understand that previewing text and visual features is a good way to develop predictions and a general understanding of the text before reading. These strategies are important for reading social studies texts, but they are also helpful for reading any other kind of text. • To wrap up, use the vocabulary journal process with the terms history, preview, social studies, text feature, and visual feature. Display the term history so that it is visible to all students. Explain the concept of history in your own words; e.g., “History is everything that has happened in the past. Historians, people who study and write about history, tell not just the who, what, and where of the past, but more importantly the why and how.” • Create a vocabulary journal entry for history, reusing your explanation and adding a picture to represent the concept of history (e.g., A historian holding up a photo of the Alamo and asking, in a word bubble or thought bubble, “Where is this and who was there? When did this happen—and how and why?”). • Ask students to create their own vocabulary journal entries for the term history. They should try to come up with their own descriptions and visual depictions rather than mimicking your entry. • Repeat the steps above with the terms preview, social studies, text feature, and visual feature.
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Achieve3000 Lesson Plan
Previewing Text and Visual Features
■■Lesson Extensions • The photograph of the Alamo in the article “What Is History?” is an example of a primary source. Photographs can reveal clues about the past. Have students find historic images in texts and/or on the Internet in such places as The National Archives. Analyze the images together as a whole class. What do these momentsin-time reveal about the subject, time period, culture, politics, and so on? What do the images not reveal? Extend the activity by having students look at their own family photographs, also primary sources, and ask them to consider what their photographs might reveal to someone looking at them in the future. • “What Is History?” mentions 1776, the year the United States celebrates the beginning of its nationhood. 1776, MDCCLXXVI, is the number shown at the bottom of the pyramid on the American dollar bill and on the tablet held by the Statue of Liberty. Provide background about the American Revolution. Then give students time to research the American Revolution and create the front page of a historically accurate newspaper, documenting important events and people of the time period. Students can write news articles from the point of view of a reporter on the scene or create mock interviews with politicians or military leaders. They might choose to write an editorial or create a political cartoon. Their newspapers can focus on any time period starting in 1775 when the war began at Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts, and ending in 1783, when the Treaty of Paris was signed. • Teach students an effective note-taking strategy in which they structure their notes using the title and subtitles. Beneath each heading, students should write a summary sentence about the section. Related unit readings include “Freedom: How We Got It,” which is about the Constitution, and “A Puzzle From the Past,” which is about the Battle of Chelsea Creek, which took place during the Revolutionary War. • Encourage ELLs to access prior knowledge and take educational advantage of the cultural heritages present in your classroom by having some of your ELL students share about the history of their homelands.
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Achieve3000 Lesson Plan
Previewing Text and Visual Features
■■Lesson Masters Sentence Strips from “What Is History?”
Lesson Masters
What Is History? History is the study of past events. You Are a Historian Did you know that you are a historian? What Historians Do History and the World of Social Studies History is just one part of social studies.
This photo of the Alamo in San Antonio was taken around 1922, eighty-six years after the famous battle there. Cross-Curricular Lessons
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