Because almost half the class did not understand the role that details play in a literary piece, we decided to go back to the concept. I designed a lesson that would showcase the role of these details. Whenever students are having trouble visualizing the role of a literary device, there’s two things you can do. You can pinpoint their presence in a text and talk about what they do, or you can take them out of the text to have the students experience their absence. Having seen how the “close” reading had reached only half of our children, I opted for the second alternative.

I took a dramatic passage out of the book Caddie Woodlawn, by Carol Ryrie Brink to use as a “mentor text.” The first few chapters of this Newberry winner are not very descriptive, but as we approach the culminating point there is a moment where she carefully describes how the girl crosses the icy river with her horse to meet the Indians. I chose the first two paragraphs of this chapter as a mentor text.

Mentor texts help students understand the role that various writing conventions, skills, and processes have in the overall quality of the text. They are normally quite short. Teachers usually select mentor texts that showcase only one or two of these aspects at a time. So my Caddie Woodlawn passage was perfect, because I didn’t have to explain the whole story to get the kids into it. Not a lot happens in this passage, so it can be summarized easily. With comprehension out of our way, struggling readers can “get the gist” and concentrate on the task of understanding the role of a literary element.

I made a list of the descriptive details used by the author in this short passage. Foremost in my mind was the need to show teachers how authors do not limit themselves to sensory details when crafting great descriptions. By tallying the details, I discovered that the bulk of those details pertained to movement. Carol Ryrie Brink did not use a lot of details to describe color or sound or taste, but she used no less than 17 different words to show exactly how the girl’s horse avoided death while crossing the icy river. This analysis gave me a very good sense of how to explain the role of details in this passage. I was ready for the lesson.

What would happen if you had a machine that could “squeeze out” all of the descriptive details from a text? What would you be left with? That’s what I did. I re-wrote the passage without its descriptive details and ended up with a very succinct summary, which I gave to the kids as a handout. We used it for a few purposes: We read it to get the gist of the story, to use as a contrasting text to the original, and to ask ourselves revision questions. The students drew a diagram of the action, and a few struggled because of the lack of details.

After we read and discussed this pared down version, I divided the class into two groups. The two groups did the same thing, but one worked independently while the other gathered on the rug with me to review the concept of descriptive details. Both groups were to use the tallied list of details to locate them on the original version. During this time, I asked them to concentrate on only one question: Why would the author use so many great and different words to describe movement in this passage? After ten minutes of this exercise, they wrote down their one-sentence answer.

I recruited their teacher’s help for the next part. My intention was to have her model the language used for literary analysis, so she answered the question out loud. She explained the author needed the reader to see it all in slow motion, like a slow movie, because it was dramatic. Then I said, “but why wouldn’t the author use taste, sound, color details?” I had them put their heads down and close their eyes in order to listen to a “taste-centered” version of the text. When we were done, some were laughing.

“This has nothing to do with the story!”
“That was ridiculous, getting her to taste the ice and the river water.”
“Exactly, now you know that the story demanded attention placed on movement because without it, you couldn’t have seen how the horse crossed the river safely.”

I collected their written responses for later analysis and left the room.