Talent borrows; genius steals. This reading technique, “Exploding Sentences,” was stolen from the much missed Ms. Wilson (late of Cap Hill; lately of lucky, lucky University Heights), who learned it, I believe, from Faye Brownlie, from whom most/all great ideas about language instruction come.
Take a sentence (or in our case, a paragraph – it is MACC after all) (whatever that means) (ahem *Mental Asylum for Corrupted Children” ahem), then use your red pen/pencil crayon to explore the author’s use of language: what you you notice about word choice? Sentence structure? Paragraph structure? Use of figurative language? Use of punctuation? Why do you think the author made those choices? What impact do you think they wanted to have on the reader?
Then get out your blue pen: what questions can you ask of the text? What do you want to know more about?
Finally green: can you use known information to try to answer some of the your questions? Can you make predictions?
In December we finished reading Book One, The Golden Compass, of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series (fasten your seat belts for Book Two, The Subtle Knife!). This is my third time reading this book out loud with a class, and each time I appreciate it more and more. It doesn’t get any better. The energy in the room is on fire. 100% engagement.
Before reading each chapter, we would “explode” one of that chapter’s paragraphs, first privately/individually, then going hive-mind to collect our ideas on the board and deepen our understanding by teaching each other.
Two things I’ve noticed:
- Take a look at how deeper our thinking got over the course of only two months.
- A funny coincidence (or not) is that at the same time we were doing this work, focused on reading, everyone’s writing has been growing by leaps and bounds too. Funny how that works…
