Read and comprehend stories, poems and informational texts at the high end of the grades 2-3 band with support that fades

Learning goal: By the end of the year, read and comprehend literature, including stories and poetry, and informational texts, including history/social studies, science and technical texts, in the grades 2-3 text complexity band proficiently, with scaffolding as needed at the high end of the range. Activate prior knowledge and draw on previous experiences in order to make text-to-self or text-to-text connections and comparisons. This lesson gives an adult and a child a routine to share, five original texts written at the high end of the band (a story, a poem, a science article, a history article and a short how-to text), and a plan for taking the support away a little at a time.

For the adult: what the grades 2-3 text complexity band means. A band is a range of difficulty, not a single level. Texts at the low end of the grades 2-3 band have short sentences, one idea in each paragraph, mostly familiar words, and meaning that is stated outright: the author writes "Ruby felt embarrassed." Texts at the high end of the range have longer sentences with more than one part, paragraphs that carry two or three ideas at once, some words the child has never met in print, and meaning that is implied, so the author shows a feeling through what a character does and trusts the reader to work it out. A second grader is expected to read texts in this band proficiently, which means accurately and with understanding, and to reach the high end with scaffolding as needed. Scaffolding is temporary support: a grown-up reading aloud every other paragraph, a stopping point marked with a sticky note, a question asked before the child thinks to ask it. The word proficiently does not mean quickly, and it does not mean alone. It means that, by the end, the child understands the text and can show that understanding by retelling, answering and comparing.

For the child: what a harder book feels like. A harder book has longer sentences, so you may need to read one sentence twice. It has more ideas in one paragraph, so you have to hold more than one thing in your head. It has new words, so you sound them out from their letters and parts, and then work out what they mean from the words around them. And it does not always tell you how a character feels; it shows you, and you have to notice. None of this means you are a bad reader. It may mean the book is at the high end of the band, and that is exactly where a good reader is supposed to slow down and use a routine.

The routine: preview, chunk, question, reread, summarize. Preview means looking before reading: the title, the pictures, the headings in an article, the first sentence of each paragraph. While previewing, activate prior knowledge by asking, "What do I already know about this?" For a story about a lost mitten, a child draws on previous experiences of losing things and of cold hands. Chunk means reading a small piece, one paragraph or three or four sentences, and stopping. Chunks this small are for a short text that is hard; in a longer book that is going well, stop at the end of a page or a chapter instead. Question means asking, at every stop, "Who is this about? What just happened? What am I not sure of?" Reread means going back over the sentence that was confusing, more slowly, looking for the words that explain it. Summarize means saying the chunk in your own words in one or two sentences before moving on, and, when the text ends, saying the whole text in a few sentences. The same five steps work on a poem; the chunk is a stanza instead of a paragraph, and the question "What picture is this making?" replaces "What just happened?" On a history text, add the question "When did this happen, and what changed?"; on a how-to text, the chunk is one step, and the question is "Could I do this step now?"

Connections and comparisons that help. A text-to-self connection links the text to something the reader has lived: "I hid my hand in my sleeve once when my glove was wet." A text-to-text connection links the text to another text: "In the puddle article, the water seems to vanish, and part of it may come back someday as rain, and in the mitten story the mitten seems lost for good and then turns up on a fence post." A comparison goes one step further and says how the two are alike and how they are different. Any connection can make a book more fun to read. A connection helps the reader understand the text when it sends the reader back to the words. "I lost a hat once" is a start; "I lost a hat and I told my teacher right away, but Ruby does not tell anyone, so she must feel differently from how I felt" is a connection that deepens comprehension, because it makes the reader notice what Ruby does.

How the adult withdraws the scaffolding. Early in the year, the adult and the child read the high-end text together: the adult reads a paragraph aloud, the child reads the next, the adult marks the chunks and asks the questions, and the adult starts the summary sentence for the child to finish. In the middle of the year, the child reads every paragraph, the adult supplies only the words the child cannot decode, the child and adult take turns asking questions, and the child gives the summary while the adult checks it against the text. By the end of the year, the child previews silently, chooses the stopping points, asks the questions in a whisper or in a reading log, rereads without being told, and writes or tells a summary that the adult only listens to. Supports can come back when a new kind of text is harder; the usual order is the one above because the child needs the questions before the child can ask them, and the child needs to hear a good summary before the child can make one.

The misconception, and why it is wrong. Many children believe that if they can say all the words, they have read the book. Saying the words is decoding. Reading and comprehending means knowing what happened, why it happened and what the author left unsaid. A child can decode every word of the mitten story and still miss that Marcus keeps his bare hand in his pocket to hide that he is cold. A second belief is that needing help proves the book is too hard. At the high end of the band, needing some help is expected; the goal is to need less each time, not to need none on the first day.

A worked model inside the lesson. Take the first chunk of the story below, the first paragraph. Preview: the title says a red mitten, so something happens to a mitten, and the reader already knows that mittens come in pairs and get lost. Question after the chunk: What did Ruby do on the way to school? She stopped three times. What happened to the mitten? One is gone. Reread: the sentence "By the time she reached the coat hooks, one red mitten was gone" is long; read it again and notice that the first part tells when and the second part tells what. Summarize: "Ruby dawdled in the snow on the way to school and lost one mitten." Now the reader is ready for the next chunk, and the adult has shown every step once.

Original story — The Red Mitten

On Monday morning, Ruby walked to school through the first snow of the year. She stopped to make snowballs, she stopped to look at a dog in a yellow coat, and she stopped to slide on a frozen puddle. By the time she reached the coat hooks, one red mitten was gone.

Ruby did not tell anyone. She pushed her bare hand deep into her coat pocket and hoped nobody would notice. At recess the pocket was not enough. The wind found her fingers, and she pulled her hand up inside her sleeve like a turtle hiding in its shell.

Marcus was building a snow wall near the fence. "You need two hands for this," he said. Then he looked at her sleeve and stopped talking. He tugged off his left glove and held it out. "I'm right-handed anyway," he said, which was not really a reason, but Ruby took the glove. It was too big, and it was still warm inside.

They finished the wall together. Marcus packed snow with his gloved hand and kept his other hand in his pocket. When Ruby noticed, he pretended he was looking for something in there.

On the walk home, Ruby looked at every snowbank. She checked the frozen puddle. She checked the yard with the dog. Nothing.

Then, near the corner, she saw a flash of red. Someone had found her mitten in the snow and set it on top of the fence post, where a person looking for it could not miss it. Ruby had no idea who. She pulled it on, and it was cold, and it was hers.

The next morning she put an extra pair of gloves in her backpack. They were not for her.

Original article — Where Does a Puddle Go?

After a rainstorm, a puddle sits in the low spot of a playground. The next afternoon, the same spot is dry. The water did not run away, and nobody mopped it up. So where did it go?

Part of the answer is under the puddle. Soil has tiny spaces between its grains, and water slowly soaks into those spaces. A puddle on a dirt path usually shrinks faster than a puddle on blacktop, because water can hardly soak into blacktop at all.

The rest of the answer is in the air. Water can be a liquid, which you can pour, or a gas, which you cannot see. When water changes from a liquid into a gas, we say it evaporates. The gas is called water vapor. Water vapor is invisible, but it is real. It floats up from the puddle a little at a time and mixes into the air.

Two things make a puddle evaporate faster. The first is heat. Sunshine warms the water, and warm water turns into vapor more quickly than cold water. That is why a puddle in the sun disappears before a puddle in the shade. The second is wind. Moving air carries the vapor away, so new vapor can leave the puddle. On a windy day, wet sidewalks dry quickly.

You can test this yourself. Pour the same amount of water into two matching shallow dishes. Put one dish in a sunny window and the other in a closet. Check them each morning. The dish in the window will usually be empty first. The water in the closet will disappear too, but it will take longer.

The vapor that leaves a puddle does not vanish forever. High in the sky, where the air is cold, water vapor turns back into tiny drops. Those drops make clouds, and clouds make rain. Someday, part of your puddle may fall on the playground again.

Original poem — What the Snow Hid

All night the snow came down to hide
the things we left out in the yard:
the shovel and my brother's sled,
a bucket, frozen hard.

By morning all the yard was smooth
and white, as if it had no past,
but every lump was keeping something,
and we dug them out at last.

Original history article — Two Brothers from Dayton

Wilbur and Orville Wright ran a bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio. They built a kite and then gliders, because they wanted to learn how a machine could fly and be controlled in the wind.

On December 17, 1903, on a windy stretch of sand near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Orville took the controls of their flying machine. The engine roared, and the machine rose into the air. It stayed up for twelve seconds and flew about 120 feet, about as far as eight cars parked in a row.

That was not a long trip, but it was the first successful flight of an airplane with an engine. The brothers took turns and made three more flights that day. The longest lasted almost a minute.

Original how-to text — The Two-Dish Test

You will need two matching shallow dishes, a measuring cup and water.
Step 1. Pour half a cup of water into each dish.
Step 2. Set one dish in a sunny window. Set the other dish on a shelf in a closet.
Step 3. Each morning, look at both dishes. Draw how much water is left in each one.
Step 4. Write down the day each dish is empty.
What to look for: the dish in the window is usually empty first, because warm water turns into vapor faster. The dish in the closet takes longer.

Worked routine on the story, with the adult supporting: Preview: the title and the first sentence tell us this is a winter story about a mitten; prior knowledge says mittens get lost and cold hands hurt. Chunk 2 (Ruby at recess): question, "Why does Ruby not tell anyone?" The text does not say; reread, and the clue is "hoped nobody would notice," which shows she is embarrassed. Chunk 3 (Marcus): question, "Is 'I'm right-handed anyway' a real reason?" Reread: the author says it "was not really a reason," so Marcus is giving Ruby an excuse to accept help without feeling bad. Chunk 4: the adult asks, "Why does Marcus keep his other hand in his pocket?" Reread, and the child notices he is now the one with a cold hand and is hiding it, just as Ruby did. Summary of the whole story: "Ruby loses a mitten and hides her cold hand. Marcus quietly gives her his glove and hides his own cold hand. Someone Ruby never identifies puts the mitten where she can find it, and the next day Ruby packs gloves to give away." The last line is implied: the text never says Ruby wants to help someone, but the extra gloves that "were not for her" show it.

Worked routine on the article, with the child leading: Preview: the title is a question, and the headings are missing, so the child reads the first sentence of each paragraph and predicts that the article will answer where puddle water goes. Prior knowledge: puddles dry up; the child has seen it. Chunk 1: summary, "A puddle dries up, but the water did not run away." Chunk 2: the new word is "soaks"; rereading shows it means the water goes into the tiny spaces in the soil, and blacktop has almost none. Chunk 3: the technical words are "evaporates" and "vapor"; the sentence right before each one explains it (liquid into gas; a gas you cannot see). Chunk 4: question, "What are the two things?" Reread and count: heat and wind. Chunk 5: the child says the test in order, two dishes, window and closet, check each morning. Chunk 6: summary, "The vapor turns back into drops high up and becomes clouds and rain." Whole-text summary: "Puddle water soaks into the ground and evaporates into the air as vapor; sun and wind make it faster, and the vapor later becomes rain."

Worked text-to-self and text-to-text connection: Text-to-self: "When my jacket got soaked, my mom hung it by the heater and it dried fast." Back to the text: the article says heat makes water evaporate faster, so the heater did what the sun does to the puddle. That connection is good because it returns to a sentence in the article. Text-to-text comparison: both texts are about something that seems to disappear. The mitten really is somewhere the whole time and comes back the same; the puddle water changes into vapor, and part of it may come back someday as rain, not as the same puddle. Alike: something lost returns. Different: the story is about a person's choice, and the article is about how water behaves whether anyone chooses or not.

Worked routine on the poem, with the adult supporting: Preview: the title says the snow hid something, so the reader expects things to go missing and perhaps to be found; prior knowledge says snow covers everything and a yard looks different after a storm. Chunk 1 (the first stanza): question, "What picture is this stanza making?" Snow falling at night on a shovel, a sled and a bucket that were left outside. Reread "a bucket, frozen hard": whatever water was in the bucket has frozen solid in the cold night. Chunk 2 (the second stanza): question, "What does 'as if it had no past' mean?" Reread: the yard looks so smooth and new that it seems nothing ever happened there, but "every lump was keeping something," so each bump in the snow is one of the lost things underneath. Summary: "Snow covers the things left in the yard, and the smooth yard looks empty, but the lumps show where everything is, and the family digs them out." Text-to-text connection: like Ruby's mitten, the lost things are in the snow the whole time and come back, which sends the reader back to the fence post in the story.

Worked routine on the history article, with the child leading: Preview: the title names two brothers and a city, so the article is about real people in a real place; prior knowledge says airplanes fly, but maybe not that someone had to invent them. Question for a history text: "When did this happen, and what changed?" Chunk 1: the brothers ran a bicycle shop and built a kite and then gliders to learn how flying works. Chunk 2: the date is December 17, 1903; the flight lasted twelve seconds. Reread "about as far as eight cars parked in a row": the author compares the distance to something the child has seen so the number means something. Chunk 3: what changed is that an airplane with an engine had flown successfully for the first time. Summary: "In 1903 two brothers from Dayton made the first successful flight of an airplane with an engine; it was short, but it was the first."

Worked routine on the how-to text, with the child leading: Preview: the title says a test and the steps are numbered, so this text tells the reader what to do, in order; prior knowledge comes from the puddle article, which describes the same test in one paragraph. On a how-to text the chunk is one step, and the question is "Could I do this step now?" The list of things needed: the child checks that there are two dishes and that they match. Step 1: half a cup in each, so both dishes start the same. Step 2: reread "one dish in a sunny window" and "the other dish on a shelf in a closet"; the only difference between the dishes is where they sit. Step 3: the child asks, "Why draw it every morning?" and works out that the drawings show which dish is losing water faster. Step 4: the day each dish is empty is the answer to the test. Summary: "Put the same amount of water in two matching dishes, one in the sun and one in a closet, check them every morning, and write down which is empty first." Text-to-text: the how-to text gives the steps, and the puddle article gives the reason, that heat makes water evaporate faster.

Reading log: Over the next weeks, read at least four texts that feel like the high end of the band: two stories, one poem and two informational texts, one about history or social studies and one about science or how something works. For each, keep a log page with five boxes labeled preview, chunk, question, reread and summarize. In the preview box write one thing you already knew. In the question box write two questions you asked while reading. In the reread box copy the sentence you had to read twice and say what it means. In the summarize box write two sentences that tell the whole text. Mark on each page which steps an adult helped with and which you did alone.

Independent performance: Choose a new book or article you have not read before and that an adult agrees is at the high end of the grades 2-3 band. Read it with the routine, using as little help as you can, and then show your understanding to the adult. Success criteria: you preview and say one thing you already know before reading; you stop at least three times and ask a question each time; you reread at least one hard sentence and explain it; your summary tells what happened or what the text explained, in order, without adding things that are not there; you make one text-to-self or text-to-text connection and say what it helped you notice in the text; and you can name one step you did without help this time that you needed help with before.

Scaffold check for the adult: After the performance, tick which supports were still needed (word help, marked stops, asked questions, started summary) and choose one to remove next time.