Close Reading with a Purpose

Close Reading is a strategy I begin practicing in my classroom at the beginning of the year and continue to practice with students with every text we read. Close Reading allows students to gain a deeper understanding of the text in order to extract details and most importantly to make connections. It is all about the connections students can make with the text to deepen their understanding and become successful 4th grade readers and writers.

Here's one Close Reading strategy that we use when reading a text. It is the UNERD strategy.

U= Underline the title and make connections

N= Number the paragraphs

E= Evaluate the questions

R= Read the text and annotate purposefully

D= Determine the Answers

Let me break it down for you with a text on Hurricane Katrina which is fitting for the day since it is the 11th Anniversary of the storm.

STEP 1= Students should WRITE UNERD at the top of their text

STEP 2= UNDERLINE THE TITLE & Make Connections AND EACH PARAGRAPH (underlining each paragraph is something new I added this year. This helps students chunk, or break down the text and gives them stopping points  to THINK about what they have read.) 

STEP 3= NUMBER THE PARAGRAPHS

STEP 4= EVALUATE THE QUESTION

For this text, our GUIDING QUESTION was 

Is this a firsthand or secondhand account? Support with evidence. 

STEP 5= READ THE TEXT AND ANNOTATE WITH PURPOSE

Below you can see we annotated the text for purpose. We noted the key word Hurricane Katrina and that the author provides us mostly facts about the storm, how it came to be and its effects on the New Orleans area. 

STEP 6 = DETERMINE THE ANSWER

(Stay tuned for how to answer a short response question.)