Close Reading for Setting: A Low Resistance Entry Point

Close reading is a critical skill for readers. It’s not easy to teach in many cases. For all the books on close reading and scholarly articles claiming the benefits and offering suggestions, it doesn’t change the complex nature of teaching close reading or students’ enjoyment.

With that said, close reading, in my experience, is one of the most powerful ways of helping students become competent and confident readers. Close reading isn’t a way to make students hate reading, it’s an avenue for them to stop hating reading.

I think the main trick, as if it’s this simplistic (because it’s not), is personal investment in inquiry. More often than not students treat reading as a passive, beach-related activity. As I’ve discussed several times, when this attitude is reinforced (which is sufficiently done before fifth grade), it’s rather challenging to break students’ perceptions or repurpose their image of what reading is. There’s much more to reading when we take students deeper into texts. Students need to opportunity to deep dive into a text.

One book I’ve used with students in the past is titled The Dollar Kids by Jennifer Richards Jacobson.? It’s a rather long text for a whole-class instructional text so it was important to define a purpose for the segment or chapter of the text we would use for close reading. In this case, we focused on the details Jacobson offered that developed the setting.

The idea was to locate evidence in the text that would help students create an image on paper that would confirm their visualizations and identify how close reading text details contributes. It also allowed readers to see how during the “boring” part of the story (meaning no action), authors set the backdrop to the story. Without these details visualization is stunted, background knowledge isn’t stimulated (i.e. “That sounds like my house), and students struggle to latch on to the story, other than to passively read, because the story seemingly takes place in a void.

The Dollar Kids takes place in a fictional town called “Millville.” I know the actual town the story was modeled after, but for those familiar with Maine or Massachusetts mill towns, the descriptions of the setting could create an ephemeral experience for anyone from these places. On page 21, Jacobson begins her detailing. It’s almost fitting that she portrays these examples through the character Lowen, who finds solace in his art. She writes:

“Each one had a triangular roof, just like the ones little kids make when drawing a house. Below the roofline were two windows. Below the two windows was a porch roof. Some of the houses had an open porch. Others had a three-season room with windows. Most were a faded greyish white.? And maybe because the porches drooped, or perhaps because they all had funny additions to the backs or side, Lowen thought of them as granny houses.”

So let me ask you. Were you able to come up with an image in your head?? What helped you create that image?? My guess is that the explicit details, somewhat automatically, helped you orchestrate what background knowledge you had to develop an image, even if it wasn’t entirely accurate.

Next, did you know this place? These are two different questions, but they both draw on the same text evidence. Jacobson details that if we lived in a place like Milltown, you’d easily recognize it. If you didn’t live in a place like Milltown, perhaps, like me, you started to think of base housing, the standardized housing units that many military bases have.

At this point, we can be comfortable with surface-level comprehension having visualized, made connections, and drawn on background knowledge. This is great. We successfully comprehend the text.? Why then is close reading necessary?

As we have an image in our head or related to the text, strong details paint these images.? Here we dive back into the text to uncover those details. For those who may not visualize successfully and those learning to close reading, uncovering details creates two opportunities: 1) students can see how the author uses language to convey a message. 2) students can use the details to reconstruct the image on paper, drawing their houses based on the details.

Using the same excerpt, I bolded the text evidence.? In doing so, I represent what I would ask students to do. Rather, they would highlight the details in the text that would support their visualizations of their homes.

“Each one had a triangular roof, just like the ones little kids make when drawing a house. Below the roofline were two windows. Below the two windows was a porch roof. Some of the houses had an open porch. Others had a three-season room with windows. Most were a faded greyish white.? And maybe because the porches drooped, or perhaps because they all had funny additions to the backs or side, Lowen thought of them as granny houses.”

Looking at this excerpt, eight details help readers visualize the houses.? These represent the evidence I asked readers to search out during their close reading. For some, it was confusing that entire sentences were highlighted and consecutive sentences as that. Nonetheless, the front side of the houses became rather clear. As for the funny additions, well… that’s a different story.

What’s more is that there are (in my opinion) three instances where clarifying had value. “open porch,” “Three-season room,” and “Granny houses” are the terms that students could easily read without any fluency issues, but may not know readily.? Only a few months that I learned what a “shotgun shack” was. A “granny house?”? What is a “three-season room?” I may live in Maine, but the closet I am coming up with is a muck room or a vestibule where boots and hats are taken off before entering the main homestead. Some students may know. For others of us, we need to take a bit of time to figure things out.? That’s ok!

After the reading, students etched out their interpretations of their text evidence into their reading response journals. This provided students with a meaningful purpose rather than just highlighting text or listing the details the author used.

I am fortunate enough to know Jennifer Richards Jacobson enough to drop an email thanking her for the books she wrote and how her work created a pathway for students. In this case, because students were fifth graders and cutting their teeth on close reading, we simply turned the mined evidence into illustrations that were etched out in their reading response journals. I was able to share a few students’ samples with Richardson. To our surprise, meaning the class, she responded. Not only did she respond to compliment student efforts but shared her journal depictions from her initial stages of writing the book.? The students were blown away because their etchings nearly matched those of Jacobson's!

There are many ways to introduce close reading. Where better than to start where kids need to gain interest the most? Characters, settings, and conflicts.