It's my Citing Text Evidence Intro Lesson!! CCSS RL1 and RI1 are all about answering questions using text evidence! This lesson is perfect for test prep, especially since PARCC is filled with text evidence questions! Text evidence is always super hard for my third graders, y'all. They don't have a lot of experience citing evidence when they come to me, so an explicit lesson about text evidence is a MUST! So here's how my text evidence lesson goes:
Now. I always, always, always say that we as elementary educators have to leave our dignity in the parking lot sometimes for the sake of learning and fun! This is one of those days, folks. Dressing up as a Text Detective makes this lesson so much more fun for both the students and the teacher! Their faces light up with excitement when they walk in and you are dressed like this....
Next, I bust out my high school theater arts skills and start playing up the whole Text Detective role. I explain to students that we have to be Text Detectives to prove our answer with text evidence. I explain where we find text evidence (in the text of course). Then I show my students this handy-dandy anchor chart:
We go over using strong sentence starters to PROVE our answers. "PROVE IT" becomes a phrase used daily in my classroom! All I have to do is say "PROVE IT!" and they know that I want to hear some text evidence!
After we go over the anchor chart and talk about what text evidence is, it's time for modeling! I like to use a book that we have already read so that my students are familiar with the text and can focus on answering the question being asked. For this lesson, I chose First Day Jitters by Julie Danneberg because it was a fun and quick read.
I blasted one of my Text Evidence graphic organizers on the SmartBoard and posed this question: "How did Sarah feel about the first day of school? Prove it!" I wanted to start with an easier question so they could really get the hang of using text evidence to find an answer. I then modeled going through the text with my magnifying glass to hunt for text evidence. When I finally found my answer and evidence, I started recording my answer.
First, I made sure to reinforce PQA (Put the Question in the Answer) when answering the question. Then I chose a strong sentence starter to prove my answer with text evidence.
Then, I tell the students it's their turn to be text detectives! The kids always get super excited at this point! The first thing they want to know: DO WE GET MAGNIFYING GLASSES?!?!?!? My answer is always: OF COURSE!!!!!
I'm always jealous of math teachers because they get awesome manipulatives to use in math class, so I always get super excited when I can find hands-on tools to use in ELA! I bought these little magnifying glasses at our local party store for pretty cheap. The kids just love them!
Each child then gets 3 things: a magnifying glass, their own text evidence notes page (a version of my anchor chart), and a practice passage. This particular week, we were learning about character traits so I chose my citing text evidence page that covers character traits.
Students read through the passage once to become familiar with the text. They then read the questions. They reread the passage and hunt for text evidence to answer their questions. They hunt for the evidence using the magnifying glasses and then highlight the evidence using a highlighter (this lets me see if they are really using the text to answer their question or not). They then answer the questions. The first part asks the text-dependent question and the second part asks the student to prove their answer with text evidence.
In my PROVE IT pack, I have posters to use with a bulletin board but being the super busy teacher that I am, I never hung them up. So I just stapled the anchor chart to my bulletin board because we use this poster SOOOOO MUCH!! It is really convenient to have the poster hanging by my small group table where we use it almost everyday!
If you're interested in getting some resources to help your students learn how to cite text evidence like a text detective, make sure you check out my pack: PROVE IT! Citing Text Evidence Like a Text Detective!
Thanks for stopping by, friends!
