 Alaya Ginden is a Great Age Humanities teacher with Foundations for the Future Charter Academy South Middle School Campus. Today, Alaya and his students are using the closed reading strategy as they begin to examine the novel The Hunger Games. Closed reading gives students an opportunity to engage in deeper thinking by giving them focused opportunities to ask questions, examine new vocabulary, make connections, and begin to clarify and monitor their understanding of a new text. Reading is a careful and purposeful re-reading of a text. So often when you learn to read in elementary school and in younger grades, you learn to read for the story, for the overall gist of something. What we want you to learn this year in middle school is to read more closely and more in-depth of what the author is trying to get across. Closed reading helps students learn a structure to strengthen their inner voice. By asking themselves a progression of text-dependent questions, students are able to analyze and think critically about what they are reading. This is, you can unstaple this and you can put it around your desk in any way that it might remind you of how you want to do your closed reading. Or you may want to keep it in the package, up to you. The second thing is, for sure, keep this out because I want you to follow along. She must have had bad dreams and climbed in with her mother. Of course she did. This is the day of the reaping. But what I do find is I find that if the text is too difficult, closed reading can sometimes be a little bit daunting at first. And that's why we have to model everything at the beginning so that kids can understand what to do with it, like circling words, underlining passages, sentences, highlighting, and again, like I said before, asking questions of the text so that they can go beyond their struggles of thinking, oh this might just be too difficult for me, I'm going to read something else. The closed reading strategy allows students to have structured conversations with each other, building on their understanding of the different texts they read. As well, you as a classroom teacher have the opportunity to engage in meaningful conversations with your students in order to ensure that they are developing a comprehensive understanding of what they're reading and making critical connections to further deepen their thinking. Okay, bring it back to the larger group. First of all, as I read, as you re-read, as you thought, any questions or wonderings come up about the text? Anything at all? Alex? Well, they talked about something called reading day a lot, I was kind of curious about what that was. Excellent, excellent. Myron? Why are they using districts? Like how many districts are there and what about them? And were you thinking a little bit more, how is this going to be used in the rest of the book? Yes. So a little bit of that. So it's great because in Grade 8 here we start with two pre-chosen novels for the kids and then they move into their self-selected. And I think that close reading, again, even though it might seem a little bit regimented at first, I think that when you get into the habit of asking a really in-depth critical questions, you can do that with each other of all sorts of different novels. And then you get this rich understanding of what so many different authors and their purposes of the writings are. We can kind of tell each other what our purpose is about. And then from that we can just, like, so like when you do that, like the person kind of knows what you're reading and they can even see like how you're understanding the book differently and then how the other person's reading. And I feel like we already do that. So let's say one of us forget a book, usually me. And I'm like, I can't even book. So she gives me one of the books. She's like, I think you'll like this and like what is it about. And then we talk about it. And then we read books sort of unlike each other's interests. And it just gets our minds going and we usually when we talk we talk about the books and we have different views. And once again this gets us going into a really good idea about what the book is in different perspectives. So I'm noticing that kids are thinking much more critically about text and they're thinking more deeply and they're forming opinions about the kinds of novels that perhaps they didn't otherwise think that they could form opinions about. So for example, The Hunger Games. They were just reading it for enjoyment. But now I'm finding that kids are really thinking, okay well is there a message or a theme that the author was intended to, that intended their kids to take out from the novel instead of just reading it on a very surface level. So I definitely find that they're thinking more critically and more in-depth about not only novels but short stories and even poetry as well. Well now I feel like I can read a book and kind of like go deeper into it because like right before we did this I can just skim through books and kind of get like the need just of it. But then sometimes it's a hard book I kind of reread it. But now I feel like even if it's just like a book that's like an okay to read I'm gonna have to reread it. Yeah I would agree with her. So let's just say I read a book I skim through it. I enjoyed it. I read it again and I go more closely into it. I look for new words that I didn't know. I look for new context that I didn't realize was there. I look for clues that the author is giving me. That would just simply give me a better understanding of the book and the meaning behind it.