The final article in our current National Geographic Explorer magazine was titled "Wild Land," and tied into our science unit beautifully (love it when that happens...). In science we have been studying the interaction between land and water, and one of the major concepts has been erosion. This article focused on areas that have been eroded in very unique ways and by a combination of wind, water, movement of the earth, etc.
Before we read, we began by creating graphic sketches (quick, meaningful pictures) to show our understanding of these terms: erosion, glacier, landslide, weathering. If you can click on these pictures to get a close up look I'd encourage you to do that. I absolutely loved seeing all the different ways that students think about these things and brought them to life. All together, their pictures create a very holistic understanding.
After working with these terms we dove into reading the article. As with each article we read, I ask students to first read the entire article to get a "big picture" understanding of the article. Once we have that, then we go back and break it down. Each section in the article focused on a different location and a different erosion process, which caused us to think "cause and effect" and "sequence." The students worked in groups to identify the process of erosion for one of the article's sections. Breaking down the article and identifying the specific stages of erosion turned out to be quite challenging, and as we reread each section again as a whole class we realized just how important it is to study the author's structure. We discovered that within each section there was a 1-2 paragraph introduction, and then the steps of erosion. Very powerful learning!!! Text structure and organization in SOOOOOO key to understanding what we read in nonfiction texts!!!
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