In my classroom, I normally follow 2010 National Teacher of the Year Sarah Brown Wessling’s close reading strategies. Over time, I have modified it to meet the needs of my students. While reading, students are doing three basic things: making observations, noting patterns, and drawing conclusions. However, just giving students a poem and asking them to read and highlight can go terribly wrong. Therefore, I have found it imperative to incorporate these three tasks into a gradual release model relying heavily on think-alouds initially modeled by me. I have also found it beneficial to give students a specific purpose for reading; this purpose directly relates to the day’s standard. For example, the standard might be, “RL.9–10.4 Determine the
