Reading Strategies

Dogteam is a beautiful book to read aloud.  For younger children the poetry will best be understood with some teacher guidance.  The sensory & descriptive words make you feel like you along for the run.  Living in the south, many of our students have never seen snow or heard of dog sledding- so this is a wonderful text to introduce them to these concepts. 

Dogteam is an example of prose poetry.  This type of poetry is meant to be read aloud; has rhythms, rhyme, assonance (repetition of similar vowel sounds), and consonance (repetition of similar consonant sounds) present in many other forms of poetry; vivid imagery and emotional effect; there is a continuous sequence of sentences without line breaks. 

Inferring from the Cover and Illustrations as Well as the Text

It is important to use all aspects of the book to infer meaning.  Picture books offer students the unique opportunity to create meaning not just from the text, but from the illustrations as well.  Early readers often use pictures to help them create meaning, especially when they come to a word they don’t know in the story.  Older students can also use illustrations to help them understand the story.  In Dogteam, Ruth Wright Paulsen’s illustrations convey moods such as excitement, fear and anxiety, exhaustion, happiness:  there are the dogs with their ears held back and noses anxiously pointing toward their run straining against their harnesses, the dogs howling and “singing” with excitement, the dogs running heads down with tongues hanging out, and many other wonderful illustrations just waiting for student interpretation. 

You can start out showing students the cover of the book and asking them what they can infer from the cover.  Students may comment on the dogs running hard and being tired, you can ask, “How do you know?” and get students to describe what in the illustration made them think that.  You can also ask students what they think a “dogteam” is.  When students offer an explanation you can ask, “Did the author tell you that?” and discuss making inferences. 

You may want to create a chart with your students to use as you read the story: 

Questioning That Leads to Inferential Thinking

In the book Strategies That Work, Stephanie Harvey gives examples of ways students can create meaning through asking questions.  She says that poetry, with its images and metaphors, provides students with ample opportunities to exercise their powers of interpretation.  Poems that are somewhat abstract and may prove difficult for students to understand often lend themselves well to using questioning as a strategy to better understand the poem.  Teachers may want to model for students their own struggle to understand the poem, tell students that you have some ideas about the poem, but aren’t entirely sure of the meaning.  Harvey says that sharing your own doubts can open up the opportunity for students to risk sharing their own interpretations & inferences.   

You may want to read the whole story aloud once, then read it again one page at a time and write students’ questions on a chart. 

Some sample questions:

• Why is it blue & white on the snow at the same time?
• What does the author mean by, “You could read in the dark”?
• Why do the dogs tremble?
• Why do the wolves run alongside the dogs?
• What does the author mean by “Pace the dogs, pace our hearts and our lives”
• What is “the blue dark”?
• What is a harness?
• What is a gangline?

After recording students’ questions, go back and discuss the questions.  Students may not always agree on the answers, the questions serve as prompts to the interpretation of the poem and inferences about its meaning.  Students may want to find out more about the author and about dog sled racing to help them make interpretations.  Students may ask more questions than they answer, that’s okay as long as their questions take them deeper into the poem and inspire a thoughtful conversation. 

Visualizing from a Vivid Piece of Text

This book includes a lot of vivid visual details, which creates a wonderful opportunity to discuss visualizing with students.  The story begins with a vivid, detailed description of what it looks like outside at night as the sled dogs are being harnessed for the run:     

          In the full moon when it is blue and white on the snow at the same time, so bright and clean and open you could read in the dark, we harness the dogs and run at night. 

You may want to read some of the descriptive passages, such as this, in the book aloud while your students close their eyes and visualize the scene.  When you finish, ask students, “Tell me about what the night you imagined looks like.”  Stephanie Harvey says that students’ comments will often reflect “the movie running through their minds”.  After discussing their images of the scene, have students draw a picture of the scene.  Student pictures may look very different as students combine their own prior knowledge with the words from the story, but this is what visualizing is all about- taking the words of the text and mixing them with the reader’s preconceived ideas to create pictures in the mind.

Have students write an online review of the book:  http://www.buildingrainbows.com/ 

Have students use the Internet to research the Iditarod race:
http://www.utmsi.utexas.edu/staff/dunton/k12/k12%20Iditarod%20activity.htm

http://www.cabelasiditarod.com/trail.html

Reader's Theater

If you’ve never tried using Reader’s Theater in your classroom, this would be a great opportunity!  Where’s the Boss? is a Reader’s Theater play that tells the story of one musher & his loyal dog sled team. 

Script:  http://web.archive.org/web/20031227090411/http://www.iditarod.com/boss-script.html

Lesson plan:  http://web.archive.org/web/20031227090705/http://www.iditarod.com/bosslesson.html

Teacher’s Guide for Reader’s Theater:  http://www.loiswalker.com/catalog/teach.html 

Another great site with more Reader’s Theater information & scripts to use:  http://www.teachingheart.net/readerstheater.htm

Strategies That Work by Stephanie Harvey