THE SECRET GARDEN:
Annotated With Reading Strategies
by
Frances Hodgson Burnett
and
Strategies Added by
Terence William Cavanaugh
Originally story published in 1911, by
Frances Hodgson Burnett
Reading Strategies added in 2016, by
Terence William Cavanaugh
TABLE of CONTENTS
About this Book
Reading Strategies
Vocabulary in Context
Read Aloud and Reading while Listening
Using Your Ebook Tools
The Two Chapter Ones
Book Pre-reading: Vocabulary
Book Pre-reading: KWL
Standards
1 There is No One Left
1 There is No One Left (answered)
2 Mistress Mary Quite Contrary
3 Across the Moor
4 Martha
5 The Cry in the Corridor
6 "There Was Some One Crying—There Was!"
7 The Key of the Garden
8 The Robin Who Showed the Way
9 The Strangest House Any One Ever Lived in
10 Dickon
11 The Nest of the Missel Thrush
12 "Might I Have a Bit of Earth?"
13 "I am Colin"
14 A Young Rajah
15 Nest Building
16 "I Won't!" Said Mary
17 A Tantrum
18 "Tha' Munnot Waste No Time"
19 "It Has Come!"
20 "I Shall Live Forever—and Ever—and Ever!"
21 Ben Weatherstaff
22 When the Sun Went Down
23 Magic
24 "Let Them Laugh"
25 The Curtain
26 "It's Mother!"
27 In the Garden
Afterword
About the Authors
The Secret Garden - Enhanced and Annotated with Reading Strategies
Welcome to the reading strategy enhanced version of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, this book has been redesigned to help you work with this famous fictional work.
If you have been having trouble understanding what is going on when you read a book, then it is important to change the way you read a book. This book should help you practice with a number of strategies as you read with purpose and become an active reader. To read with a purpose you will have things to be thinking about as you begin to read a chapter and activities to do to help you better understand what you have read. Put together, these activities are useful in helping you practice, access, and organize information and better understanding your reading.
When you are Reading with Purpose, that means doing more than just reading the words in a chapter or section and hoping that you understand or remember it, but instead you start by thinking about what and why you are reading, even before you start reading. You might be thinking about what you already know about the book, predicting what you think a chapter is about, or looking for specific things like setting elements of where and when the story is taking place. The ideas here are to make your reading more active by you doing things about what you are reading. These activities help give you a purpose in your reading. For example let’s start with why you are reading this book. I’m reading The Secret Garden .....
to practice my reading
to get a good grade in my class
to pass the test about the book
to learn about gardening
for my own pleasure
I heard about the story and it sounded fun
because it looked interesting
because I’m bored
Did any of those reasons fit for why you are about to begin reading this book? If so then you have identified your reading purpose for this book and have done a reading strategy - you have stated your purpose in reading this book.
Reading Strategies
As you read this book the reading strategies will you will use will be in three parts for each chapter. First are the BEFORE YOU READ strategies, these are done before you start reading that book or chapter. Next are the AS YOU READ strategies, these are done as you are reading the chapter and may include activities that focus on vocabulary, note taking and highlighting. Finally, with each chapter there are the AFTER YOU READ activities, these will be between two and five reading strategies that follow each chapter that help you think about what you have read, put things together, or answer questions. You should also read actively. As you read this book you should practice "active reading," do this by using the highlighting and note taking features of your ebook to highlight the key information, and taking notes. This kind of active reading helps emphasize the information in your mind as you read, and helps you review important points, can keep your mind focused on your reading over other distractions.
Here is an example of the strategies that could be in one of the chapters of the book:
BEFORE YOU READ:
Think about the title, table of contents or pictures and try to predict what will happen in the chapter.
Think about what you already know and what questions you might have that you hope to find out as you read.
AS YOU READ:
Highlight, make notes or think about how the author uses special words or phrases to communicate.
Use context clues and your e-reader’s dictionary to help you determine the meaning of unknown words.
Highlight or make notes about statements you don’t understand, things that surprised you, questions you have about that text, or test that reminds of something you make a connection to, like something are already are familiar with, have read, or seen a movie about
.If you can talk about what you are currently reading with someone else, or even read with or to them. Talking and asking questions with others about what you are reading can be a fun way to learn more about the text.
Rereading is a good strategy when you don’t understand part of the reading. When you reread, you should read at a slower pace, think about what you have read, and look for clues to help make the text more understandable, like you might go back a page or two and see if that new that vocabulary word was mentioned or think about how the story might be if it was written from the perspective of a different person in the story.
Track or map what is happening in the story. Make notes, highlight, or diagram things that happen, such as the story elements: Setting, Characters, Mood, Events, Resolution, and Theme.
AFTER YOU READ:
Think about what questions you still have about the story.
Stop and retell the sequence of events that occurred in the chapter to see if you understand what has happened.
Identify the important key points of the story from the chapter you just finished.
Rate how you feel about the story or characters so far.
Vocabulary in Context
As you read and come to new words that you don’t know or words that are used in ways that you don’t understand, you should first try to figure out what that words means from its context, and then from your reader’s interactive dictionary, so that you can check yourself and see if your definition makes sense.
With just about any book for any reader there may be new words that you don’t know yet. If you just skip all these words because you don’t know their meaning, you may not end up with a good understanding of what you read. One nice thing about using your ereader (like a Kindle), is that you can instantly look up a word, just by pressing on that word for a moment and see a definition pop up. But, you may not ev
en need to do that, and if you do look up a word then you may find that it has multiple meanings. So one way to learn new words is to figure out their definition from their context clues: the words around them or the words in context (as they are used). Whenever you read a new word, unless it is a spelling list, you are reading it in a sentence, that sentence gives you information and clues about what the words mean. So, when you come to a word that you don’t know already, look at the context or clues around that word and figure out its meanings as you read. There are four basic kinds of context clues: Example, Definition, Descriptive, and Opposite)
Example Context: With this kind of context clue, the sentence give you hints about what that word mean by giving you examples of that word. Look at the word “bulbs” in the following sentence from the Secret Garden. From these sentences you can figure out what bulbs look like and there are some example flowers that grow from bulbs.
"Martha," she said, "what are those white roots that look like onions?"
"They're bulbs," answered Martha. "Lots o' spring flowers grow from 'em. Th' very little ones are snowdrops an' crocuses an' th' big ones are narcissuses an' jonquils and daffydowndillys. Th' biggest of all is lilies an' purple flags. Eh! they are nice. Dickon's got a whole lot of 'em planted in our bit o' garden."
Definition Context: With a definition context clue, the author is defining the word. It will not usually be like a definition in a dictionary, but they are telling you what the word means. The author may first tell you want it means and then give you the word, or they may write the new word and then tell you what it mean. Look at the word “governess” in the passage below. From this sentence you can see that a governess is someone who teaches a child to read and write, that may not be all that they do, but that would be part of their job.
The young English governess who came to teach her to read and write disliked her so much that she gave up her place in three months, and when other governesses came to try to fill it they always went away in a shorter time than the first one.
Descriptive Context: With a descriptive context you would get information about that word as the author uses other words to describe it. In the following sentence, while torrents is not defined, you can figure out that it means lots of rain.
The next day the rain poured down in torrents again, and when Mary looked out of her window the moor was almost hidden by gray mist and cloud.
Opposite Context:. Another way to understand what a word means is when the author uses words that tell you what the word is not. Look at the following text that and see how it describes a moor with things that it is not.
"Eh! We're on the moor now sure enough," said Mrs. Medlock.
"It's—it's not the sea, is it?" said Mary, looking round at her companion.
"No, not it," answered Mrs. Medlock. "Nor it isn't fields nor mountains, it's just miles and miles and miles of wild land that nothing grows on but heather and gorse and broom, and nothing lives on but wild ponies and sheep."
Read Aloud and Reading while Listening
Sometimes it helps to understand what is happening in a story when you listen to someone else read the story aloud as you read the text. To help you with this you can use an audio book version of the Secret Garden to listen to while you are reading this book. You might not do this for the whole book, you might find that after listening to a chapter or to you have a better feeling for the characters or story and you can read on by yourself. With some books, like the Secret Garden, there is also strange writing as the author has to adapt word to how people are speaking, such as with an accent. When this happens, hearing the words might help you understand the writing better. For example in this book there is this line:
"Two pieces o' meat an' two helps o' rice puddin'!" she said.
The person speaking has an accent is the author uses the o’ instead of, and the an’ in place of and (so today that would read: “Two pieces of meat and two helpings of rice pudding!”). For most readers, you can get better at your reading if you hear someone who is already a good reader read to you. Then as you get better you can either keep listening or just read the text by yourself. Here are two places you might want to go to for the audio book version of The Secret Garden to listen to, I’ve also made a short form of the web address you can type in less. In both places you can either listen to the book’s chapter online or download the chapters to your computer to be played either on the computer, your e-reader, or on a portable device like a smart phone, iPod or other MP3 player, and listen to someone read the story aloud while you read along.
Loyalbooks.com: https://www.loyalbooks.com/book/the-secret-garden-by-frances-hodgson-burnett [https://goo.gl/Bfkp3]
Librivox.org: https://librivox.org/the-secret-garden-dramatic-reading-by-burnett-frances-hodgson/ [https://goo.gl/J1sFlG]
Reading While Listening (RWL): RWL as a strategy that scaffolds reading and has shown that it can improve readers’ listening comprehension and enhance their reading proficiency. Studies have reported positive effects of RWL on reading achievement in several areas of reading such as decoding, fluency, and comprehension. RWL also usually means readers are listening to good readers (often expert actors and vocal speakers), so it models fluent reading for students while introducing them to vivid and specific vocabulary. Perhaps one of the most important reasons to try RWL is the fact that RWL increased the enjoyment of reading for many students, which may lead to increased levels of reading and in turn, improved reading ability.
Reading Aloud and Think Aloud: Reading aloud can be fun - it's an effective reading as you give voices to the characters you are reading and practice new vocabulary in action. When we read aloud, we expand get to use our imaginations, such as for how the characters speak, support language acquisition, and build your vocabulary. While reading also try the think-aloud strategy, where (even if you are reading silently) you say out loud what they are thinking about when reading, this could be something like how you like the story, asking questions of the characters, finding parts that you like, predicting what will happen, or simply answering your own questions (“I knew that was going to happen”). It is easier to remember things if you say them aloud or write them down over if you just think them.
Using Your Ebook Tools
Looking Good - Text
One of the great things about reading digital text is that you can actually adjust the text to make it better for you. Think of the Goldilocks story and how one bowl was too hot, one too cold, but the other was just right. Well that is also true with the text you are read, and you should find the one that is just right for you, not too big and not too small. You should choose to make the text just right for you and your situation. First you should find the way to display the text that works best for where you usually read. Then you might adjust that text as you go to different places. For example if you are reading in a moving car, you might pick a bigger size then you usually use.
There are three different ways to adjust how your book looks on your device. You should try to find: (1) what is the best font size for you (how big it is) when reading your ebook, (2) which font type is best for your reading (the shape of the letters), and (3) which background is the best for your reading situation (usually a color or shade) - the background question doesn't apply to eInk devices, like the Kindle Paperwhite, but some ebook programs on computers or tablets may give you options for background. If the page looks too crowded you might also try to adjust the line spacing (blank space between lines of text) and the size of the margins along the edge.
Notes & Highlighting
When paper printed books and teachers didn’t allow students to write in or mark up the book, we would use the reading strategy called Sticky Note Reading, but with a digital reader you can do the same thing with your device or program’s software using the Note or Highlight feature. You should use this kind of strategy as you read through the book to help you keep track of characters, settings, plot, ideas, themes, or details. So first you should
decide on what you are trying to track with a chapter, so that you are reading with a purpose. For example, you might read the chapter with the purpose of making connections between the text and your own life. Then for example when you find the character doing something that you have done, or want to do, you would highlight that section of text and then use the note taking or comment tool to explain how you have done that or wanted to do that.
Here are a few of the ways that you might read with purpose:
Comment (what do you think about what is happening?)
Question (I wish I could ask the author why......?)
Predict (I think that what will happen next will be that......)
Summarize (so far the main character has.....)
Visualize (I think that her house would look ....)
Making Connections (I have been to .... or I have always wanted to ..... just like the character in the story)
Monitor and Clarify (so far Mary has from a home in India with her servants and parents she didn’t spend any time with to a new home in England with servants and her uncle, but she is still alone as her parents were never with her and her uncle isn’t home either - what is different?)
Draw Conclusions (I think that Mary is mean because she .....)
Standards
In an effective standards based classroom, should also be one that is print or text rich. The strategies that are integrated into the Secret Garden address a number of Common Core State Standards (https://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/CCRA/) areas including those from the areas of Key Ideas and Details, Craft and Structure. Integration of Knowledge and Ideas, and Range of Reading and level of Text Complexity. For example the application of Reading-while-Listening (RwL), applies to the comparing and contrasting of reading a story (see) to listening to an audio recording (hear) of the same story or portion (CSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.x.7 – Integration of Knowledge and Ideas). Some strategies focus on analysis of the words used in the story (Craft and Structure: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.CCRA.R.4), while others may focus on story elements such as characters, setting and plot (Key Ideas and Details: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.x.3). Other strategies include the integration or option for technology application to analyze or express understanding (Presentation of Knowledge and Ideas: CSS.ELA-LITERACY.CCRA.SL.5). For example the following common core standards for fifth grade apply to the use of the book and the strategies included: