Here are some images of a recent activity we completed in class.
According to the Common Core, students in grade 6 need to do the following:
"RL.6.1 Cite textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text."
We spend a lot of time teaching and modelling how to look at evidence in the text to infer meaning. One way we do this is by focusing on character traits which is in our Reading Unit- Characters and Their Key Details. After a lesson on the differences between traits and feelings, we brainstorm a list of traits, positive and negative. Then, we use Harry Potter as a model and show how we can describe him with three traits and find evidence to support our inference. We show students how to enclose the direct quote from the book in quotation marks and to give the page number where the evidence was found. Students struggled slightly with this since they are so used to us saying they should not copy. Many wanted to "explain" why they thought Harry Potter was brave for instance. However, we wanted them to only give evidence as the "evidence should speak for itself" and clearly show that Harry is brave.
We also likened this activity to a historian or archaeologist uncovering clues to the past. One of the benefits of also teaching social studies to the same students is that we are able to make those types of connections for our students. In fact, while working on this project we were also using the word "Trait" in our study of the Traits of Civilization!
Back to this activity- students were required to find three traits to describe their character and then locate three pieces of evidence and quote these directly. They also needed to find some evidence that described their character's appearance and to quote that on the paper (lower left corner). Below are some other examples taken from the class.
