"...whenever any form Form of Government becomes destructive to
these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute
new Government..."
I'd say that is a pretty complex statement. Period. For my 4th graders, definitely! Complex even for me? Of course, however I have strategies that I have been taught to help me understand this statement which my 4th graders are still learning.
This is how I taught my students how to attack this statement. I am sure this method can be used or adapted for many types of text.
First, I broke this statement up into pieces and had the students try to put them back together in an order which they thought made sense to them. I gave them the strips already cut up in random order in an envelope.
They had never seen this statement before so this was all new to them. After they put it together, I had them share out how their group did it and what their thinking was for why they put it together the way they did.
Once all groups had shared and had the statement in the correct order, I then had them practice reading it aloud to each other for fluency. As an entire statement, it was a little overwhelming for my students to truly understand the meaning.
So, next came the breaking it down into its original chunks (by this I mean the strips they had to work with to put together) so that we could begin to make meaning. In a way chunking this statement, is very similar to how we teach chunking words for decoding etc
We started with the first chunk.... "...whenever ad Form of Government.." We looked at each word to make sure we understood what each word meant. If we didn't, we looked up the word and wrote the definition under the chunk in our journals. This part became especially important when we can to the words in the statement... "alter" and "abolish".
For each "chunk" of the statement we followed these same steps:
1. Did we know the meanings of each word?
2. If not we looked up each word we didn't know.
3. We then chose which definition we thought fit the word best and applied that to help us understand the chunk better.
4. Then we wrote the meaning of the chunk in our own words.
5. Once we did this with each of the chunked parts, we then put it all together in what we thought the entire statement meant as a whole.
I found that after using this strategy, my students were better able to understand the entire statement better than before we used this strategy!
Do I recommend this strategy for every text? Not necessarily! It does take some time!
We are using the ELA Modules and the texts can sometimes be very complex. I am sure there are reading specialists out there that might approach this differently, this is just one 4th grade teachers class and approach.
If you are also teaching from the ELA Grade 4 Modules feel free to check out my Module Guides for Powerpoint and Smartboard. Module 3B (The American Revolution) also includes kids friendly worksheets and anchor charts easy to print and post included for units one and two. You can see all of these for grade 4 HERE. I also have some for Grade 5 if you are interested.
Thanks!
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