It’s hard to believe that within this strange curveball of a year, it is already the middle of March.
For many of us, that means the madness of test-prep season has begun.
Well, I have your back!
At this stage of the game, here’s what I am observing: my students are REALLY STRUGGLING with their READS!!!
Deep conceptual comprehension seems mighty elusive this year.
Given that I equipped my students with my templates right from the onset of the year, and that I’ve “Bob Ross-ed” the heck out of writing instruction – I’m finding that I have a classroom of pretty decent writers. The kids that put forth an iota of effort will do just fine going forward.
But my goodness … there are misreads galore … very low MC scores … tons of subtlety going right over their heads … confusion abounding!
Many of you are familiar with Nancy Dean’s seminal text, Voice Lessons.
It’s a fantastic book to help our students foster their close reading skills; but for me – I wish that it contained at least one-million more examples.
As I sat back to consider how to close the reading skill gaps, I took stock of some things I take to be “truths.”
1. The Plato’s Play-Doh Discussion, with its gamified elements of collaboration and competition, really helps kids hone in on authorial intent and the construction of meaning better than other discussion modalities (in my opinion … and from my experience)
2. There are only so many linguistic/rhetorical moves an author can make … so hammer kids with short passages so that they can begin to identify patterns and trends
3. If we can get students to ask “juicy” questions of a text – stand back – they’re going to crush their reads
With this in mind, I set forth to create some killer review material to see our kids to the finish line.
And that’s what I have for us today.
For my AP Literature friends (this also works for traditional classes), I have created a Plato’s Play-Doh Discussion that has a ton of text samples. Quite literally, there’s days’ worth of content in here and the passage selection is pretty top-notch. So, if you’re feeling the need to do a crash course on diction, detail, imagery, syntax, and tone – fire away – there’s plenty here to drill home the point.
Here’s the link to my explanatory YouTube video:
https://studio.youtube.com/video/1rqldMW7He0/edit
And for my AP Language friends (and anyone teaching rhetoric) … I did the same for you, but with the purposes of improving rhetorical reads. Again, there’s a glut of content here.
Here’s the link to the video:
https://studio.youtube.com/video/zwo1R06Ee7s/edit
If you’d like the PowerPoint templates featured in the video(s), reach out and I’ll send everything your way.
Please subscribe to the channel if you haven’t already. I’ll be posting a lot of test-prep material in the coming weeks.
Happy teaching and happy writing!
For more information about my other projects and offerings, visit www.teachinghow2write.com
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