Reading, Again and Again

We are slowly making our way through Lucy Calkins' Readers Workshop book, "We are Readers". I have been trying to get my students to understand the idea that readers re-read books, and that reading a book is more than just flipping the pages after a quick glance. They haven't been buying this concept. So, as an object lesson on the importance of this, I had the students to draw a map of the back playground where we've been playing this week, making sure we put in as much detail as we could remember. Then told them we were going to go out to see how well our maps matched up to the playground.

Before we went outside to check our maps we discussed them as a whole class. The one piece of equipment we all remembered, and it was the first thing everyone said, was, "The big slide!" This is a big climber fort with a really long slide. It takes up half of the play area- impossible to miss.

We then took our maps and went outside to compare what we'd drawn with what was actually there:

When we got there, some of us discovered that we actually remember a lot about the playground, some discovered that they missed a lot on the playground, but what we all learned was no matter how much we remembered, there was something we missed. And that is the point of reading, and re-reading texts, because we don't always get the full picture the first time through.

This activity, while focused mainly on the idea of reading and re-reading combined  mapping, visualization, movement, creative development,  reading, and writing into one activity, plus, the kids were able to get up and get outside. But, the best part was coming back inside to deconstruct what we'd learned. The students really grasped the main idea- we may think we've seen it all, but there is always more to see and learn.