Week 2

First off I need to confess, I did not score all my DRA’s this weekend.  Instead I took a long bike ride, enjoyed my family, and took care of a few chores that have been neglected (like grocery shopping and throwing away the food in my fridge I failed to cook last week.) It’s okay though – I’m not starting reading groups until next week.  In Comprehension Shouldn’t Be Silent, we list the following activities for week 2:

Activity: Set up writer’s workshop or the writing program you use.

We continued reading Ralph Fletcher’s, “The Writer’s Notebook.”  The students each wrote an ‘unforgettable story’ from their lives. It was amazing to hear them automatically pick up on Ralph Fletcher’s voice and that of students highlighted in his book. A couple of kids are having trouble sustaining their interest for more than about five minutes of writing so I’ll have to put a little effort into engaging them.

Activity: Teach the structure and set expectations for our structured independent reading block, R⁵: Read, Relax, Reflect, Respond and Rap .

Well, we had our class meeting where I asked students if they noticed what I was doing while they read. Just as in past years, the least engaged knew exactly what I was doing – taking notes on what they were doing. Mind you, it didn’t alter their behavior, they still didn’t read. I taught the class the rules for R⁵, showed a video of former students doing R⁵, then gave it a run-through. The kids did a pretty good job with reading and relaxing. As we got to the reflect and respond part, where students think about then record a description of a strategy they used, one of them asked the million dollar question. She pointed to the list of strategies and said, “What do these mean?” Apparently, I had forgotten to do any meaningful instruction in the strategies! Perhaps the years are beginning to blend together…

Activity: Define metacognition and introduce predicting, questioning, making connections, visualizing and summarizing.

Um… see above.

Activity: Introduce think-aloud structure and use think-aloud to introduce clarifying.

I love to use a big book called, “Wild Weather” when I do this first think-aloud. It just so happened that the day I chose for this lesson was also the day we spent 45 minutes ducking and covering in the closet due to tornado warnings. Let’s just say we were all really engaged in the text as we read about hurricanes and tornadoes. Rain whipped against our windows driving the point home that weather can indeed be wild in the sunshine state! Despite the distractions, my kids were able to notice when I clarified and explain what I clarified each time.

Activity: Have students notice and share when they clarified.

Okapi has some great ebooks with lots of nonfiction text features. I threw one of these up on the projector and instructed students to read and notice when they needed to clarify. A handful had genuine examples of something they didn’t understand, a few said (probably legitimately) that they didn’t need to clarify because they understood it. A few others just made up something they clarified to demonstrate the skill. That is the problem with trying to use one text for all kids in a class I guess. This is a work in progress.

Reflecting on this week, it is obvious I need to do a better job of teaching the metacognitive strategies. I’ll create some new materials this weekend and see how it goes next week.