After several weeks immersed in nonfiction on a wide range of topics you may choose to challenge children with this final part that asks them to read critically and analyti- cally. To do this, they’ll need to use all of the foundational skills they’ve practiced in the unit so far—synthesizing to determine main idea, questioning and reacting, and fig- uring out challenging vocabulary. Here, though, children will be asked to read within one topic and look across texts to compare and contrast, rank, and categorize.
You may choose to have children begin by learning to compare, or to think about ways that information presented from book to book is alike. Teach children that as they approach the second book on a same or similar topic in their basket, they can flag places in each book where it seems as if the information is the same, or similar. They can draw a quick sketch or write a key word on the Post-it flag in each book to remind themselves of what they thought was the same. For example, if reading Simon’s book on volcanoes, a reader might flag a page where he writes about the effect that volca- noes have on people, where it shows a picture of volcanic lava encroaching upon a house with the fact,“In an eruption in 1986, a number of houses were threatened by the quick-moving lava.” Then in another book on volcanoes, Danger! Volcanoes, also by Simon, they might flag the fact,“Mount Pelée exploded in 1902, killing 30,000 peo- ple in a nearby town.” They could then come to their partnership and talk about the similar idea that’s being presented by both books, and what their own response or
reaction is. The challenging work for students is to not simply flag two identical facts in two books, like the fact “magma is molten lava” in one book and the “melted, or molten, rock is called magma” in another book, but to instead think about ideasthat are repeated across texts. Here, children will need to draw on their ability to synthesize to determine main idea.
You can also teach children to contrast information within and across texts. For example, perhaps a reader will flag a fact about houses threatened by volcanoes, but then the reader may discover a fact in another book that says, “When a volcano erupts, lava or cinders cover the ground. It looks as if all plants and animals are gone forever. But in a few short months, living things return. Plants grow in the cracks, and insects, birds, and other animals come back.” Their discussion might then contrast the infor- mation and they may come up with ideas such as, “Volcanoes aren’t all bad or danger- ous, they also help to regenerate the earth.”
If the baskets of topics are a little broader, for example “Disasters” instead of just “Volcanoes,” you might teach children to apply the same compare/contrast skills to thinking across books from a broader topic. They might use phrases or prompts to help them. For example, “With this (disaster), I learned ______, but in this one ______,” or “With (volcanoes), you ______, but with (tornados) ______,” or “One thing that’s the same between (volcanoes) and (tornados) is ______.”
After a few days of this, you may then choose to move on to teach children to rank, order, and categorize. To do this, children may think about subtopics, or categories, within their larger topics. For example, with volcanoes, kids might think of different categories, such as “effects on people” and “effects on land” and “how they’re formed.” Books with tables of contents can be scaffolds for this, but books without tables of con- tents can challenge children to use their synthesis skills to create their own categories. Readers can also think in superlative terms: meaner, harder, scarier, more useful, more of a protection, more dangerous, and so on. They can find parts of two or more books that discuss the same category, and be ready to share their ranking system with their partner. It is essential for readers to present their thinking with evidence! For example, children who are reading from a bin of books titled “Big Animals in the Ocean” might talk about killer whales and great white sharks. One child might come to the partner- ship and say, “Great white sharks are scarierthan killer whales, even though the whales are called killers. It says in the text that killer whales eat mostly fish and penguins— small stuff. But the great white shark eats sea lions and seals. I think the shark is scarier because it eats bigger prey.”
It will be best to do this work if two children in a partnership are reading and talk- ing about a shared topic. If you’re worried about partners sharing a topic because you don’t have duplicates of your books, rest assured that the only thing required is several texts on a topic; partners don’t need to read the same text. There will be great excite- ment when one book contradicts another, and this will provide opportunities for you to teach about author perspective and bias, as well as to distinguish their own point of view from that of the author of a text. Children will also be pleased when one text fills the gaps left by another. This is a perfect time to remind children that their own lives
and areas of expertise function as yet another sort of text. If a reader is knowledgeable about a topic, his own information can contradict, add to, or elaborate on the infor- mation found in texts.