Teacher Commentary

Although these questions seem simple, they are actually quite challenging for 6th graders to answer. Students always come up with a lot of different answers and have a hard time coming to consensus because of their limited background knowledge about Ancient Egypt and about basics of publishing (i.e. who an editor is).

I write all students’ ideas (even contradictory ones) about the pre-reading questions on the board. Students’ ideas range from accurate to illogical. I continually ask students what evidence they have to back up their ideas (i.e. “what in the text makes you think that?”). After generating ideas and conferring about them, I then tell students to keep these ideas in mind when we closely read the text. As we read we keep revisiting their ideas based on what we read to get a deeper sense of what is a more logical conclusion.