Clunkers and Links

Component: Reading and Writing

Objective: To develop competency in reading and writing skills

Rationale:
  • Promotes thoughtful, metacognitive readers of grade level text
  • Encourages students to make connections and links between what they are reading and prior knowledge
  • Encourages metacognition
  • Scaffolds complex and challenging texts
  • Teaches students strategies to access text
  • Provides time for practicing academic language

KEY POINTS:

Strategic Design
  • Designed for at or above grade-level readers, independent readers
  • Use with explanatory or informative text, use challenging text     

Delivery:
  • Pull leveled/homogeneous group in close proximity
  • Use the Three Personal Standards and Literacy Awards
  • Establish and articulate comprehensible language objective and content objective
  • Tell students title of text, do not show cover
  • Record students' predictions of ideas, concepts, and vocabulary they will encounter in text (background information)
  • Guided survey of text (follow SQ3R process), read titles, diagrams, charts, maps, etc . Use different color to record additional predictions
  • Explain Clunkers and Links, write on chart paper/use post-its and symbols
  • CLUNKERS: Cannot decode words, unfamiliar words
  • LINKS: Links to background knowledge (text to text, self, or world)
  • Students read a portion of text quietly
  • Each student shares Clunkers, teach skills (decoding, context clues, glossary)
  • Sketching to define/ underline syllables/phonemes, word study
  • Each student shares Links and reasoning for selection
  • Discuss content of text
  • Students continue reading text in pairs using SQ3R
  • Group is pulled back later or the next day to process Clunkers and Links and discuss content of text


English Language Development Focus & Consideration
Talk about how readers refer back to the text to understand unknown vocabulary and unfamiliar
concepts (Clunkers). Make the explicit language connection to nouns highlighting how pronouns or a synonym refer back to the same noun in the text. (e.g. Santos Manuel's most important contribution to the Serrano people was his leadership in saving his people from being killed by the local San
Bernardino militia, group of white male settlers, acted as soldiers to kill all the Native Americans that were living in the San Bernardino Mountains. They drove them to the mountains.) The underlined and italicized words are connected to make a distinction of what nouns/pronouns the paragraph is referring to in the text.