Judie Segal REED Summer 2010

Explicit teaching – A Riddle What am I thinking of?whiskersears 4 legs a nose a tongue a tail hairy horns hooves a short mane lives mostly in Africa a long neck

 Looking at only some of the parts will not allow us to be able to discern the real whole entity.  Some of the parts are more significant and will lead us to the outcome almost immediately.  Some parts are more tenuous and make it more difficult to guess their part in the whole. For example: If I had begun with the clues mammal and long neck – the answer would have been obvious from the outset.

Application to your life  In our lives, sometimes we only see part of the whole  It helps if we can see all of the parts, or at least more than just one of them  Examples

Application to Literature In literature each composition has parts which create the whole piece of work:  Title  Scenes  Stanzas  The characters  Change in settings  Other All of the parts together comprise the whole – and as in the explicit HOTS teaching above, some parts are more significant than others.

Thinking Skill Students will be able to: Sample Tasks/Questions Identifying parts and whole explain how the parts function together within the whole text. How does one part of the story contribute to your understanding of the whole text? How does the title/ending relate to different parts of the story/poem/play? What does the rhyme scheme of the poem contribute to the whole poem?

 The title of a piece of literature may give us information about the text. However it may also confuse us.  There are explicit titles and implicit titles. Let’s look at the following poem called The Loser.

Let’s look at the dictionary definition for the word: loser : definition – –noun  A person, team, nation that loses/doesn’t win. The visiting team was the loser in the series.  Someone or something that is marked by consistently bad quality performance. Don’t bother to see that film, it’s a real loser.  Slang: a misfit, especially someone who has never been successful at a job, personal relationship, etc. My old school chum has always been a loser.

Mama said I'd lose my head if it wasn't fastened on. Today I guess it wasn't 'cause while playing with my cousin it fell off and rolled away and now it's gone. And I can't look for it 'cause my eyes are in it, and I can't call to it 'cause my mouth is on it (couldn't hear me anyway 'cause my ears are on it), can't even think about it 'cause my brain is in it. So I guess I'll sit down on this rock and rest for just a minute... By Shel Silverstein

Never in the definition we found earlier, did we actually see the definition: Someone who no longer has something that they were previously in possession of. So that didn’t really help us. What is the role of the title in this poem?

 How does the scene between Keller and the neighborhood boy (their game of cops and jail) add to our understanding of Joe Keller? What is Arthur Miller trying to say with that scene?  How does the fact that The Road Not Taken takes place in a forest, add to our interpretation of the poem and its metaphor?  How does the title Genesis and Catastrophe make sense before and after reading the story?

 Let’s look at Module G from Summer 2009: Will Grass Become a Thing of the Past? Identifying parts in the text: Giving the example of Clarence Ridgely is a part  In the 1 ST paragraph we learn that he grows his own vegetables instead of a lawn around his home.  We only know in the 2 ND paragraph that he is part of a bigger project.  We only know in the 3 RD paragraph that he is part of an even bigger organization  We find out in the 5 TH paragraph that Ridgely has taken his part in the whole which we identified above even farther by added a new element of community to his gardening.

 We have identified the parts in the text –  Ridgely, Edible Estates, National Gardener’s Association, the American government, and maybe something more  It may look something like this: RIDGELY National Gardener’s Association American Government Edible Estates

 Let’s look at the kinds of questions the Bagrut asks and how we can use the skill of Identifying Parts and Whole to answer some of them:  Which questions use the thinking skill of Identifying parts and whole? 11 33 55 66 88

 Explicit teaching of the thinking skill  Application to your life  Application to the text at hand