Birds of Prey Passage & Writing Response
Use this close reading passage and writing prompt to provide your students with comprehension and response practice.
This is another free resource for teachers and homeschool families from The Curriculum Corner.
Birds of Prey
I chose this topic as we were beginning the year. I found that it was a term most students were not familiar with. Even in sixth grade, many were unsure of the meaning. This was helpful for me to be able to judge their ability to use context clues. Also, students really needed to pull from the text in order to be able to respond with a strong answer.
This passage also fit a book we were getting ready to read at the beginning of the year. To introduce parts of science, I was reading Beauty and the Beak, a book about an injured eagle. I was able to add in some small videos of eagles which were high interest.
How to use this passage
I first had students read the passage to themselves. As it was the beginning of the year, I was not yet familiar with my students as readers. Because of this, I made sure to read it aloud after students had ten minutes to study the reading on their own. I encouraged them to underline words they were unsure of.
Because I was using this as a way to get to know my learners, beyond reading the passage to them, I did little else in preparation. I wanted to see where my students were when working independently.
I did encourage students to add notes to the margins and to think about their response before they began writing.
If I was not using this as a presassessment, I would hgave practiced taking notes together. I would have used the passage to use context clues to learn new words, like carrion. Because there were words students were not familiar with, I went back to this after the initial task and practiced how students could have used context clues.
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