English Language Arts9-12+
Cognitive Strategies Close Reading Note-Catcher for Grade 9
By Wendy A.
A reusable note-catcher that Grade 9 ELA students can glue into their reading journals to track thinking strategies as they read. Students work through stops in Avi's "What Do Fish Have to Do with Anything?", using prompts that target questioning, visualizing, monitoring-clarifying, inferring, summarizing, and organizing.
Customize for your classroom
Teacher Guide & Tips
- Introduce the organizer as a bookmark-style insert before students begin the story, modeling one stop aloud so they see how a question or visualization becomes a note.
- Discussion question: At Stop 1, what does Willie's mother's silence about the vendor make you wonder, and how does that question change the way you read the next section?
- Scaffold for struggling readers: Provide sentence starters for each prompt (e.g., "I wonder why..." or "I can picture...") and pair them with a peer during the first two stops.
- Extension for advanced students: Ask them to identify which strategy they relied on most across the stops and write a short paragraph explaining how their use of it shifted as the story's tension developed.
- Estimated time: Plan roughly 15 to 20 minutes of reading-and-noting per stop, with a 10-minute whole-class debrief at the end of the session.
English Language Arts9-12+
Cognitive Strategies Close Reading Note-Catcher for Grade 9
By Wendy A.
A reusable note-catcher that Grade 9 ELA students can glue into their reading journals to track thinking strategies as they read. Students work through stops in Avi's "What Do Fish Have to Do with Anything?", using prompts that target questioning, visualizing, monitoring-clarifying, inferring, summarizing, and organizing.
Customize for your classroom
Teacher Guide & Tips
- Introduce the organizer as a bookmark-style insert before students begin the story, modeling one stop aloud so they see how a question or visualization becomes a note.
- Discussion question: At Stop 1, what does Willie's mother's silence about the vendor make you wonder, and how does that question change the way you read the next section?
- Scaffold for struggling readers: Provide sentence starters for each prompt (e.g., "I wonder why..." or "I can picture...") and pair them with a peer during the first two stops.
- Extension for advanced students: Ask them to identify which strategy they relied on most across the stops and write a short paragraph explaining how their use of it shifted as the story's tension developed.
- Estimated time: Plan roughly 15 to 20 minutes of reading-and-noting per stop, with a 10-minute whole-class debrief at the end of the session.