Lesson Breakdown: Close Reading for Setting Details

Hi teacher friends! I wanted to share a lesson we did a couple of weeks ago that was such a success! I don’t know about y’all, but I find it so helpful to see actual lessons sometimes instead of just resources or activities you can do as part of a lesson.

This lesson focused on the core standard:

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.4.3
Describe in depth a character, setting, or event in a story or drama, drawing on specific details in the text (e.g., a character’s thoughts, words, or actions).

When I taught 5th grade, one of our novel studies was on the book, Tuck Everlasting. The first chapter of that story is filled with the description of the story’s central setting, Tree Gap Woods. Since it’s extremely important to understand the setting in that story, we always did setting maps. I found that wonderful idea from Stephanie at Teaching in Room 6. I decided to take the same concept and use it on a much smaller scale.

We used the text A Small Life, which can be found on Readworks. If you don’t use Readworks in your classroom, you NEED to check it out! It’s one of my absolute favorite sites. And it’s FREE! You can read more about it here. If you assign the passage to your kids, they can answer the questions online and it will grade it for you! It is excellent comprehension practice.

Anyways, back to today’s lesson. The passage describes a hamster’s world-as told by the hamster. For the first paragraph, the reader is given clues as to what creature the narrator is. Because of this, I gave each student a colored piece of paper to act as a cover. As we read a line, the kids would move the paper down. This way they weren’t spoiled by what the narrator was and they could guess as we read more details. This made the text very engaging AND made the kids pay attention to even the smallest detail.

Once we read what the creature was, we made a little annotation to show our revelation/surprise.

When we are close reading, we always make a key for our highlighter colors. As you can see below, we used pink for highlighting details about the narrator (normally this would be the character color, but since we had just talked about point of view and this story was clearly written in first person, I wanted to reiterate this to my kids,) green for details about the setting (which was the main focus of the lesson,) and blue for additional characters. This part wasn’t added until we got to paragraph three where the additional characters showed up. I’ve found it works better to not introduce ALL the colors and create the key until you first start to need that color. If you do it all at once, it becomes overwhelming for the kids to keep up with.

As you can see, the first paragraph heavily focused on describing the setting. This was helpful to see later when one of the questions asked what the main idea of paragraph one was.

We also reviewed inferring when we read that the hamster considered this small cage home. We inferred that he loved this based on all the info we had read. We indicated this with a little heart annotation.

Even though the main focus of this lesson was setting text details, we still did a regular close reading because this text was such a good piece for reviewing past skills and strategies like inferring above and identifying unknown words like we did below. When we read the word ‘abode’ I asked the kids to raise their hand if they didn’t know that word. We circled it since it was an unfamiliar word and then we read the sentences around it. We determined that abode must mean home and after googling the word, we discovered we were correct! We wrote the meaning right above it. This really helped seeing context clues in an actual passage and not just isolated in focused practice sentences like you would use when learning about context clues. That’s what is so great about close reading-it’s its own mini spiral review!

Whenever we close read, I always pause and ask the kids questions at certain parts in the text. This is where we stop and jot our thinking on sticky notes. After we reading paragraph 3, I had the kids give me two details that served as evidence for how the narrator shows that he and the cat are not friends.

Another stop and jot we did prepared the kids for the question they were going to have on the question set. This was the question they had to answer on their own:

Based on the passage, summarize the positive and negative aspects of the narrator’s life. Use evidence from the text to support your answer.

Uhh, that’s a little intense, isn’t it! We broke it down while we were still on the lesson and took a little note. I asked them to tell me what the word positive meant and what the word negative meant. After determining that it was basically ‘good’ and ‘bad’ they seemed to understand the question a little better.

Once the close reading was complete, it was time for the detailed setting map! I gave the kids scissors and glue and told them they had to find and cut out 5 details from the text to include in their detailed setting illustration. This really helped them use the text to visualize what the setting looked like.

I feel like starting out with a smaller/shorter text will help prepare us for more detailed and complex text that have many more setting details. This was the perfect lesson to introduce this activity. We loved it!