What Can You See? Creating Literacy Entry Points With Explicit Instruction in Structure and Form

Form is more than formatting — it’s the frame that makes meaning visible.

KELSEY HAMMOND
Senior Professional Development Coach
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It started with a check.

Not a big one—no commas or decimal points. Just a small rectangle with a date, a name, and a dollar amount. Neat, predictable.

And totally opaque to my students.

We were reading Ordeal by Cheque by Wuther Crue—a wordless narrative told entirely through a series of fictional checks. The task was complex but doable: piece together a story based on these transactions, analyze what happened, and make a claim. It had the intrigue of a puzzle and the potential for deep inference work. But when we put the first check under the document camera, something unexpected happened.

The room went quiet. Not the focused kind of quiet—more like the what am I looking at? kind.

It turned out that the hardest part wasn’t the story. It was the form.

Which line was the name? Where was the date? Who was giving the money and who was getting it? These were the questions that came first—and for good reason. We hadn’t taught the structure.

And I get it. Checks aren’t exactly a part of most teenagers’ daily routines. But this moment reminded me of something I’ve learned (and relearned) over and over again: if we want students to read deeply, we need to start by helping them read the form. Before we get to the big ideas or higher-order questions, we have to spend time on the what is this thing? questions. Not as an aside. As the entry point.

So we zoomed in. Literally.

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Reading the form

We used a See, Think, Wonder protocol—but this time, for the check itself. What do you see? “There’s a number up top.” What do you think it means? “Maybe that’s the date?” What do you wonder? “Is the name the person writing the check or the person getting the money?” These observations weren’t off-topic. They were the topic. And they gave us a way in.
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From there, we layered in language. We built a vocabulary foldable—one flap for “memo line,” another for “signature,” another for “pay to the order of.” It was simple but powerful: now, students had words to name what they were seeing. Noticing turned into knowing. We weren’t just reading the story. We were reading the form.

That same move—the shift from seeing to naming—applies across genres. Take poetry. Before we ever introduce words like stanza or line break, we can invite students to notice: What do you see? “There’s a bunch of short lines, then a space, then more lines.” That’s a doorway. Once students walk through it, we can offer the language: those bunches of lines? They’re stanzas. That space? It signals a shift. Now we’re building a bridge from what they can observe to what they can understand.

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From noticing to knowing

Once we’d built that foundational knowledge with Ordeal by Cheque, we moved into our next layer: structure. We used the Lifelines strategy, a kind of sentence-frame scaffold that helps students slow down and name what they’re seeing in the text. “It says…” (the evidence). “This means…” (the interpretation). “This is important because…” (the significance). Repeated over time, this structure doesn’t just support comprehension—it teaches students how to think through a text.

And then, with all that in place, we let students fly.

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Collaboration grounded in form

We used a strategy called Debate Team Carousel. Students worked in groups of four, each with a paper divided into four quadrants. The first student made a claim about what happened in Ordeal by Cheque—something like “The checks reveal a hidden love affair.” Then they passed the paper to the second student, whose job was to add a piece of evidence to support the claim. The third student added a counterargument, challenging the interpretation of the evidence to support the claim. And the fourth student had the opportunity to add their two cents, negotiating between the claim and the counterclaim based on the evidence. Each round was built not just on content knowledge, but on reasoning, voice, and collaborative writing. And all of it was grounded in their careful reading of the form.
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Suddenly, the room was anything but quiet. Students were huddled over their papers, whispering, negotiating word choice, re-reading a check for the third time to be sure. It was the kind of messy, generative thinking that only happens when the foundation is solid.

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There’s a lesson here, and it’s not just about checks.

It’s about how we teach students to read.

Before we can ask them to make meaning, we have to show them how the meaning is built. What’s the shape of this text? What are its parts? What do you see before you start thinking or wondering?

When we start there—with what’s visible—we invite students into the work. We say: you already know how to notice. Let’s build from that.

And when we return, again and again, to the basics of structure and form—not just as vocabulary, but as tools for understanding—we’re not watering down the work. We’re strengthening the foundation. Because deep thinking isn’t just about hard texts. It’s about having the scaffolds to hold that thinking up.

So next time your students stall on a poem, or a graph, or a quirky one-page story told through a series of checks, pause before jumping into theme or tone.

 Zoom in. Ask: What do you see?

 And let that be the beginning.