Fact or Fiction: Learning About Worms Using Diary of a Worm

Overview

Featured Resources

From Theory to Practice

 

OVERVIEW

Do worms live underground? Are they good diggers? Can they really read and write? As students read Doreen Cronin's Diary of a Worm in this lesson, they learn to separate the facts from the fictional details. Students begin the lesson by brainstorming what they know about worms. They then begin examining the book in layers. Four read-aloud sessions engage students by focusing attention on different features of the text in each session. In a whole-group setting, students explore the illustrations, fictional details, nonfiction details, and captions and speech bubbles. In this way, students are given concrete strategies that they can use to help differentiate narrative and informational elements in other books they read.

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FEATURED RESOURCES

Concept Map graphic organizer: Students can use this graphic organizer to list facts they learn about worms as they read the story.

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FROM THEORY TO PRACTICE

Kletzien, S., & Dreher, M.J. (2004). Informational text in K–3 classrooms: Helping children to read and write. Newark, DE: International Reading Association.

• In their book, Kletzien and Dreher describe several techniques for introducing and teaching comprehension strategies specific to informational texts. These same strategies are useful for fully appreciating and understanding fictional texts that incorporate informational elements. These comprehension strategies include accessing prior knowledge, predicting, questioning, making connections, visualizing, inferencing, using text structure to identify major ideas, paraphrasing, clarifying, summarizing, and creating pictures and graphs (56).
  
  
• We know that strategies can be effectively taught when they are introduced one at a time, with the teacher explaining directly what the strategy is, how to use it, and when it is appropriate.
  
  
• Students need to have scaffolded lessons in which the teacher gradually releases the responsibility for using the strategy to the student. It is vitally important, however, to have this practice within the context of real reading for meaning so that students will learn the importance of using these strategies for comprehension. Explicit explanation and practice (of comprehension strategies) in connected reading are the best ways for children to become strategic readers.

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