Hello? Anyone out there? Oh, you're still there? Good. Me too :) Sorry for the hiatus, I hate it when work gets in the way of life, lol! I'm just going to jump back in and talk about Close Reading today, as it is a strategy that I LOVE and we had a lot of success with it about a week ago. The students were VERY apprehensive about it at first, but once they got the hang of it, they realized just how easy it can be! As part of our new literature series, Prentice Hall Literature, there is an awesome Introductory Unit that we use to teach students important strategies before we dive into the textbook. I'm loving how in-depth the process is, but it can get a little dry for the kiddos. To teach Close Reading I started by projecting the first page of the Hunger Games, which I just grabbed by doing a "Look Inside this Book" on Amazon. I read it aloud to them, and told them to pretend they had never read The Hunger Games even though the majority of them had. I