Close Reading: Crushing Claim and Evidence Questions in Informational Text
Lesson 4 of 9
Objective: SWBAT cite textual evidences to support claims of an author's point of view about lyrics in music.
To start this lesson, students will engage in defining vocabulary words related to evidence and claims in a text. Knowing vocabulary is so important when needing to understand how to answer questions about details in a story. A list of words such as
Claim, Insufficient, Evidence,Statement, Relevant/irrelevant, Purpose, Position,Bias
will be given to students to define. To help utilize time effectively in this lesson, I will talk from the Close Reading Skills Vocabulary power point to help students understand the denotation of each word. From here we can start identifying and analyzing claims in a text.
As a class, we will read and annotate John Denver text. I firmly believe that students must have a purpose for doing anything with a piece of text. As students complete their annotation, their papers will look like the following:
Circle statements revealing author's point-of-view or opinions
Draw arrows to statements that convey or support each circled viewpoint
(Next to arrow) explain whether or not the opinion/stance is appropriately presented or supported through the use of diction, figurative language, organization, etc.
Now that students have annotated the article, it's time to organize the claims in a graphic organizer. The use of analyzing and organizing information in this story will build students' comprehension of the accusations in the text. To complete this task, students will work in pairs to complete the claim graphic organizer. See an example, working on graphic organizer for John Denver Testimony, on how students responded to this activity. Even view a sample student organizer to see possible answers for this activity!
To end this lesson, students participate in the strategy Room for Debate where they answer EOG related questions in small groups. To make the debate interesting, each group will be assigned either answer choice A, B, C, or D. After each group answers their questions, the spokesperson will stand and identify claims and examples of how their answer choice is correct or incorrect. This activity allows students to begin justifying why answer choices on the EOG are right or wrong.
Because I ran out of time, check out how I went over answers to each question. Although students were not able to defend their answers, I modeled this identical behavior in the going over answers to John Denver Testimony question video.