Read and comprehend stories, dramas, poems and literary nonfiction at the high end of the grades 6-8 band with support that fades

Learning goal: By the end of the year, read and comprehend literature, including stories, dramas and poems, and literary nonfiction, in the grades 6-8 text complexity band proficiently, with scaffolding as needed at the high end of the range. Build background knowledge and activate prior knowledge in order to make text-to-self, text-to-text and text-to-world connections that deepen understanding of the text. The same routine applies to any grade-level literary or informational text: read and comprehend it, with scaffolding as needed, and use prior knowledge and previous experiences to make text-to-self, text-to-text and text-to-world connections and comparisons. This lesson explains what the band demands, gives you a five-step routine that a teacher gradually stops running for you, and applies the routine to four original texts written at the high end of the band: a story, a piece of literary nonfiction, a poem and a drama scene.

What the grades 6-8 text complexity band means for a reader. A band is a range of difficulty spanning three grades, and sixth grade enters it at the low end and is expected to handle its high end with support. Texts at the high end are demanding in four ways, and none of them is simply "hard words." Sentences are long and layered: a sentence may open with a qualification, interrupt itself with a detail set off by commas or dashes, and deliver its main clause last, so the reader must hold the opening in mind across the interruption. Paragraphs carry several ideas and often a turn: an essay paragraph may state a fact, complicate it and then reflect on it before it ends. Vocabulary includes words unfamiliar in print, some technical (tidally locked, maria), some literary (reproach, provisional), and some ordinary words used in unusual senses. And meaning is implied rather than stated: a story shows a character's guilt through what he cannot look at, and a piece of literary nonfiction lets a fact stand for an idea it never names. Literary nonfiction is true writing that uses the tools of literature, such as scene, voice, image and reflection, and it sits in this band alongside stories, dramas and poems because it asks for the same inferential reading. Proficiently means reading accurately and coming away with the meaning, well enough to summarize in order, answer from the text and connect it to other texts and to the world. Scaffolding as needed means that for the hardest texts a teacher may still preview vocabulary, mark stops, supply questions or provide a partner, and that the support is meant to shrink. One caution about measuring: a readability formula that counts only sentence length and word length, such as the Flesch-Kincaid grade level, places the story in this lesson at about grade 4.5 and the essay at about grade 6.6, mainly because the story's dialogue is short. The story's difficulty lies in what it leaves unsaid, which a formula cannot count, so judge a literary text's place in the band by its implied meaning and structure as well as by its sentences.

The routine: preview, chunk, question, reread, summarize. Preview: read the title, headings and first sentences; identify the kind of text; and activate prior knowledge by writing what you already know. Where you know nothing, build background knowledge before reading: a two-minute check on what "tidally locked" means, or on how an understudy's job works, is part of proficient reading, not a shortcut around it. Chunk: read one paragraph, stanza or exchange of speeches and stop. Chunks this small suit a short, dense text at the high end of the band; in a longer book that is going well, chunk by scene, section or chapter. Question: what was that chunk about, what happened or what did I learn, which sentence or word resists me, and what is the author leaving me to infer? Reread: return to the resisting sentence, break it at its commas, dashes and joining words, find the main clause, the part that could stand alone as a sentence with its own subject and verb (in "He had, he realized, been waiting for it, not wishing exactly, but waiting," it is "He had been waiting for it"), then look for the clue in the sentences nearby. Summarize: one sentence per chunk; at the end, six or seven sentences that keep the order, include the implied meaning and add nothing the text does not support. Repeat steps two to five for every chunk. The routine is identical for a story, a drama, a poem and an essay; only the chunk size and one question change.

Three kinds of connection, and the test each must pass. A text-to-self connection links the text to your experience; a text-to-text connection links it to another text; a text-to-world connection links it to something true about the world beyond you and beyond books. Each deepens understanding of the text only when it returns to the text. "I was in a play once" is a memory. "I was an understudy and half hoped the lead would be sick, which is why Dev cannot look at the dressing-room door" is a text-to-self connection that explains a line. "The essay says the far side was first photographed in 1959, and my science book says the spacecraft that took those pictures was the Soviet probe Luna 3" is a text-to-text connection that adds a fact the essay omits. "The essay's point that we mistake the unseen for the dark applies to how people talk about places they have never been" is a text-to-world connection that extends the essay's idea and sends you back to check that the essay really makes it. The test is the same three times: does the connection change what you notice in the text?

Prior knowledge, previous experiences, and the difference between a connection and a comparison. Prior knowledge is what you already know: facts, word meanings and how a kind of text usually works. Previous experiences are what you have lived through: a rehearsal, a night spent looking at the sky, a time you hoped for something you were ashamed to want. Both are resources, and they help in different ways. Prior knowledge usually helps you understand what a text says; knowing that the Moon orbits Earth makes the essay's first paragraph readable. A previous experience usually helps you understand why a person in the text acts or feels as they do, or why an idea matters to people. A connection names a link: this is like that. A comparison goes one step further and says how the two things are alike, how they differ, and what the difference shows about the text. "Dev's pause reminds me of my own nerves in a play" is a connection. "Like me, Dev rehearsed a moment by counting; unlike me, he abandons the count on stage because he is thinking about Marisol, which shows that the pause comes from guilt, not from skill" is a comparison, and it teaches something the connection alone did not. Each of the three kinds of connection can be turned into a comparison, and they work on informational texts as well as literary ones. "The Side We Never See" is an informational text written as literary nonfiction: it explains real facts about the Moon, so the routine, the connections and the comparisons apply to it as they would to a textbook chapter or a news article. There is one extra rule for an informational text: a connection must never replace the facts the text gives. If your own experience seems to contradict the essay, your comparison should say so and send you back to check which is right, not quietly trust the memory.

How the scaffolding is withdrawn. Early in the year, a teacher previews the vocabulary and the background knowledge, marks the stops, supplies guiding questions and models the summary. In the middle of the year, you build background knowledge yourself from a source the teacher names, choose your own stops, write your own questions and compare them with a partner, and write the summary for the teacher to check against the text. By the end of the year, you decide what background you lack and find it, chunk where the text demands, keep questions in a reading log, reread without prompting and hand in a summary that is only read. Each support is removed after you show the step on a text you had not seen, and the aim is the fewest supports you can manage at the high end, not none on the first day.

The misconception, and why it is wrong. Many readers believe that background knowledge is cheating, that a proficient reader should get everything from the page. The opposite is true: the writers of high-end texts assume their readers know things, and a reader who lacks the knowledge cannot see what the text is doing. The essay below assumes you know that the Moon orbits Earth; if you did not, its central image would be invisible. Proficient readers notice the gap and fill it. A second misconception is that a connection is anything the text brings to mind. A connection that stays with the reader may hold their interest, but it does not deepen understanding of the text; a connection that returns to the text does.

A worked model inside the lesson. Take the third paragraph of the story, in which Dev learns that the lead is ill. Preview has established that he is the understudy. Chunk: the paragraph from "Ms. Rowe found him" to "the door." Question: "Why does the text say he 'looked at the floor'?" Reread: the sentence before says the news is that Marisol is ill, and the sentence after says he "had, he realized, been waiting for it." The floor is where he looks because he cannot meet the eyes of someone delivering news he had wanted. Summarize: "Dev learns the lead is ill and that he will have to replace her, and his inability to look up shows that he had hoped for this and is ashamed of the hoping." That is an implied meaning drawn from three sentences, which is what the band asks.

Original story — The Understudy

For eleven weeks Dev had known every line of a part he would never play. That was the deal with being an understudy: you learned the role, you rehearsed it in the empty afternoons when the real cast had gone home, and on opening night you sat in the third row with a program in your lap and clapped for someone else.

He told himself he did not mind. Marisol was good. She had a way of pausing before the big speech in the second act that made the whole gym go quiet, and he had never managed the pause without it looking like he had forgotten the words.

On the afternoon of opening night, the pause was still on his mind when Ms. Rowe found him in the hallway. Marisol was ill, she said, properly ill, a fever, her mother had called. Dev looked at the floor. He had, he realized, been waiting for it, not wishing exactly, but waiting, the way you wait for a bus you are not sure you want to catch. He could not make himself look at the dressing-room door.

"You know it," Ms. Rowe said. It was not a question. "You've known it for weeks."

He did know it. He knew it so well that when the lights came up he forgot to be afraid, and the first act went past like a corridor he had walked a hundred times. It was only in the second act, when he reached the speech, that he stopped.

He had planned the pause. He had practiced it in his bedroom, counting. Now, with the gym so quiet that he could hear the radiator ticking, he found that he did not want to count. He wanted to think about Marisol, at home with a fever, listening to the clock and knowing what time the second act began. He let the silence run until it hurt, and then he said the line.

Afterward, people said the pause was the best part. His father said it. Ms. Rowe said it, with an odd look. Dev nodded and thanked them and did not explain, because the explanation was not the kind of thing you could say out loud without it sounding like a confession.

The next morning he walked to Marisol's house with a program, the one with his name written in pen over hers. He stood on the step for a while before he rang the bell, trying to decide whether he was bringing it to her or returning it.

Original article — The Side We Never See

Anyone who has looked at the Moon for more than a moment knows its face. The dark patches that people have called a rabbit, a man or a woman with a bundle are the same dark patches every night, in every century, from every country. This is not a coincidence, and it is not luck. The Moon turns on its axis in the same time it takes to travel once around Earth, so almost exactly the same half is always turned toward us; a slight wobble lets us see a little way around the edges, and no farther. Astronomers call this being tidally locked. The rest of us call it, wrongly, the dark side.

It is not dark. The far side of the Moon receives as much sunlight as the near side; it simply receives it while facing away from us. When the Moon is new and its near side is in shadow, the far side is in full daylight. What we mean when we say dark is unseen, and the two are not the same thing, though the mistake is an old one and easy to forgive.

For all of human history until the autumn of 1959, no one had seen more than a sliver of the far side. That year a Soviet spacecraft looped behind the Moon and sent back the first photographs: grainy, smeared, and astonishing. The far side, it turned out, was not a mirror of the near side. It had far fewer of the dark plains that make the face we know, and it was crowded with craters, a rougher and older-looking country than the one that had been staring at us all along. Nine years later, three astronauts who flew around the Moon became the first people to see it with their own eyes.

It is worth pausing on how strange this is. An object more than two thousand miles across had hung in the sky for as long as there had been eyes to see it, and nearly half of it was a secret, not because it was hidden but because of the geometry of two bodies turning together. Nothing was concealed. We simply could not get around to the other side.

Perhaps that is why the far side keeps its hold on the imagination even now, when it has been mapped in more detail than parts of our own ocean floor. It is the nearest example we have of a thing we could not see, called dark for centuries, that turned out to get its full share of sunlight all along. The lesson is less about the Moon than about the word. What we cannot see, we tend to call dark, and we are usually wrong.

Original poem — New Moon

Tonight the sky has nothing in its hand.
The calendar insists the moon is there,
its far side turned full face into the sun,
its near side turned toward us, dark and bare.

I used to think a new moon was a loss,
a coin the night had spent and would not show.
Now I think of someone standing with her back to us,
lit on the side that we will never know.

Original drama scene — Cue Forty-One

Characters: RIYA, thirteen, running the lighting board; MR. BOATENG, the drama teacher. Setting: a cramped lighting booth at the back of a school gym during the second act of a play. Through the glass, the stage glows. RIYA's hand rests on a slider.

MR. BOATENG: (whispering, leaning in) Cue forty-one is the pause. Don't rush it.

RIYA: (not taking her eyes off the stage) I never rush it.

MR. BOATENG: Last night you rushed it.

RIYA: Last night the actor rushed it. I followed him.

(On stage, below them, the speech stops. The silence stretches. RIYA's hand does not move.)

MR. BOATENG: (barely audible) Now?

RIYA: Not yet.

(The silence goes on. Then an actor speaks a single line. On its last word, RIYA slides the fader down, and the whole stage turns blue.)

MR. BOATENG: (letting out a breath) Nobody out there will ever know you did that.

RIYA: (still watching the stage) That's how you know it worked.

Worked routine on the story, with scaffolding shown: Preview: the title names the job; prior knowledge says an understudy learns a role and rarely performs it; background knowledge to build, if needed, is what a program and a dressing room are in a school play. Chunk 2: question, "Why mention the pause?" Reread: Marisol's pause silences the gym and Dev cannot do it; the pause is the measure of the difference between them, and the story will return to it. Chunk 3: reread "not wishing exactly, but waiting," and the simile about the bus; the sentence admits a wish while denying it, which is the story's honesty about a feeling Dev is ashamed of. Chunk 6: question, "Why does he not want to count?" Reread: he wants to think about Marisol listening to the clock; the silence he lets "run until it hurt" is both the best pause of the night and a kind of apology. Chunk 7: Ms. Rowe's "odd look" suggests, without proving, that she may guess; Dev's refusal to explain, because it would sound "like a confession," names the guilt without naming it. Final chunk: "bringing it to her or returning it" leaves his motive uncertain, and the story ends on that uncertainty deliberately. Summary: "Dev, the understudy, has secretly half-hoped to go on. When the lead falls ill, he performs well, and the pause he could never manage comes from thinking guiltily about her. Praised for it, he cannot explain, and the next morning he stands at her door with the program, unsure whether he is giving it or giving it back."

Worked routine on the literary nonfiction, done with fewer supports: Preview: the title implies an unseen side; the paragraph openings move from the familiar face, to a correction, to a history, to a reflection, to a conclusion; background knowledge to activate is that the Moon orbits Earth and shows phases, and background to build is the term "tidally locked," defined in the text itself. Chunk 1: the Moon rotates once per orbit, so one half always faces us. Chunk 2: the far side is not dark; it gets equal sunlight; "dark" is being used to mean "unseen." Chunk 3: first photographs in 1959, fewer dark plains, more craters; first seen by people nine years later. Chunk 4: nothing was concealed; the geometry of two bodies turning made half a world unseen. Chunk 5: the turn to reflection, the lesson is about the word. Summary: "The Moon always shows Earth the same face because it is tidally locked. The far side, wrongly called dark, gets as much sunlight as the near side but was unseen until a spacecraft photographed it in 1959 and people saw it nine years later; it has fewer dark plains and more craters. The essay reflects that half of something we looked at for all of history was hidden only by geometry, and concludes that we tend to call what we cannot see dark, and are usually wrong." The final sentence is the implied idea the essay builds toward and states only at the end.

Worked connections of all three kinds: Text-to-self: "I once resented a friend who got the solo and felt ashamed of resenting her; that is why Dev looks at the floor, and why the pause is an apology as much as a performance." This returns to two lines. Text-to-text: "Dev's guilt is a far side: it is there all along, Ms. Rowe may glimpse it in her odd look, but he calls it something else because he cannot face it. The essay's last sentence, that we call what we cannot see dark, describes Dev exactly." This joins the story and the essay and deepens both. Text-to-world: "People describe neighborhoods they have never visited as dangerous the way the far side was called dark; the essay's distinction between unseen and dark applies." This extends the essay's idea and returns to its second paragraph to check that the distinction is really there. Each connection passed the test: it changed what the reader noticed in the text.

Worked routine on the poem and the drama scene, with fewer supports: Poem: chunk by stanza. The background knowledge to activate is the essay's point that the far side receives sunlight; without it, "its far side turned full face into the sun" is only a strange phrase. Stanza 1: the new moon cannot be seen, yet the speaker insists it is there and lit on the side away from us. Stanza 2: reread the turn at "Now I think." The speaker's old idea, that a new moon is a loss, a coin "spent," is replaced by a new one, a person with her back turned, "lit on the side that we will never know." The implied meaning, never stated, is that a person we cannot see into is not therefore dark. Summary: "The speaker once thought the new moon was simply missing but now, knowing it is lit on the far side, sees it as a person turned away whose bright side we cannot see." Drama: chunk at each stage direction, and treat the directions as text, because the scene's most important action has no words. Question: "What does each character want?" Mr. Boateng wants the cue on time; Riya wants to follow the actor, not the clock. Reread "RIYA's hand does not move": her stillness is the argument she is winning. Summary: "During a performance, a student running the lights waits through a long silence despite her teacher's nerves, changes the light on exactly the right word and tells him that no one noticing her hand in it is the proof it worked." Connections: text-to-text, the scene and "The Understudy" both turn on a pause the audience feels without seeing how it was made; text-to-world, much of the work that makes a performance or a public event run is designed to go unnoticed, which is also the essay's point about what goes unseen.

Worked text-to-self connection and comparison on the informational text: Previous experience: "On a camping trip during the new moon, I could not find the Moon at all and assumed it had simply stopped shining for a few days." Connection: the essay's second paragraph is about exactly that kind of assumption. Comparison: "Like the people the essay describes, I treated what I could not see as dark, because I did not know that the Moon was still lit by the Sun on its far side; the essay explains that when the Moon is new, 'the far side is in full daylight.' Unlike the essay's example, mine was about the whole Moon seeming to disappear for a few nights, not about one side of it, so the essay's idea reaches further than its own example. The likeness shows how much the essay depends on one piece of prior knowledge, the geometry of the orbit, and why it explains that geometry in paragraph 1 before it makes its point about the word dark in paragraph 2." The comparison returns to two paragraphs of the essay and changes what the reader notices in them: the essay is built in that order on purpose. A reader whose memory is less clear than this one should still check the essay's facts rather than the memory, because on the facts the text is the authority.

Reading log: Over the coming weeks, read at least six texts at the high end of the grades 6-8 band: two stories, one drama or play scene, one poem and two pieces of literary nonfiction, such as a personal essay, a narrative account of a real event or a reflective piece of science or history writing. For each, keep a log page with the five steps. Under preview, name the kind of text, write what you already knew and note one piece of background knowledge you had to build and where you found it. Under chunk, record the number of stops. Under question, write at least three questions that came from the text. Under reread, copy the sentence you reread most and mark its main clause. Under summarize, write six or seven sentences that keep the order and include one implied meaning. Add one connection of each kind, text-to-self, text-to-text and text-to-world, with the line each sent you back to. Record which supports you used.

Independent performance: Choose a new story, drama excerpt, poem or piece of literary nonfiction you have never read, at the high end of the band, and read it with the routine using the fewest supports you can, and none if you can manage it. Then hand in your log and summary and explain your reading to a teacher. Success criteria: your preview names the kind of text, states prior knowledge and identifies any background knowledge you built; you chunked the text yourself and recorded at least four questions of your own; you reread at least two sentences and can identify the main clause of each; your summary keeps the order, includes at least one implied meaning and contains nothing the text does not support; you make at least two connections of different kinds that each cite a specific line and say what they changed in your reading; and you list which supports you used and which you no longer needed.

Scaffold review: Mark on the support table which column you are in for each of the five steps and choose one step to move a column to the right before the next text.

Connection-to-comparison item, with a model answer: Turn this text-to-self connection into a comparison that deepens understanding of the essay: "My little brother is scared of the dark side of our backyard at night." Model answer: "Like the people in the essay, my brother treats the part he cannot see as dark and threatening. Unlike the far side of the Moon, our backyard at night really does get no sunlight, so the comparison has a limit. The essay's point is not that everything unseen is safe or lit; it is that what we call dark is often only 'unseen, and the two are not the same thing.' The comparison sends me back to paragraph 2 and makes me notice that the essay separates two meanings of one word; it does not claim that nothing is ever dark." A strong answer states a likeness and a difference, says what the difference shows, and quotes or cites the part of the text it returns to.