For anyone just tuning in now, this is the fifth week of my chronicle as I get my metacognition-focused classroom up and running. I'm taking the activities Michelle Kelley and I suggested in our book, Comprehension Shouldn't Be Silent (IRA, 2007) and sharing how the first six weeks look in my classroom circa 2012. If you are on the same journey or a parallel one, pipe up and let us know how it's going in your classroom!

Week 5

This week I focused on coaching students as they used the literacy structures put in place so far such as writer’s workshop, read-aloud and R⁵: Read, Relax, Reflect, Respond and Rap. During R⁵ as I took the status of the class, I noticed several students who were reading different chapter books each day. One of them said he finished the book he was reading the day before. He reads nonstop in class and I think he probably did finish his book.  One of the other students said she left her other book at home so she got a new one. I asked about the book she was reading the day before that and she said it was boring. I’m going to monitor her during status for a couple of weeks and step in if the pattern continues. I do have a lot of readers this year though (yeah!)

The other activities listed for this week include:

Activity:  Introduce the text feature walk structure

I did a heavily scaffolded teacher-led text feature walk through the cover story on a Scholastic News. This went alright but the students didn’t jump in and take the reins from me like I wanted them to. I wanted to show a video of former students doing a text feature walk but the DVD player on my computer is broken and I couldn’t get the sound to work in the computer lab so I may have to white-knuckle this one and just let the students try it themselves.

Activity: Begin literature circles training

I haven’t started literature circles in the first six weeks of school for a number of years. We are still perfecting all the other structures and it is a little much to add at this point. When we do start, I’m going to offer a variety of books on writing for kids like the Writer’s Notebook and How to Write Your Life Story (both by Ralph Fletcher. I might throw some author biographies in there as well. I’ll wait another month before adding this.

Activity: Continue to add to the text feature wall

We are!

This year has been a little different than others because I have all my new text feature resources from Reading the Whole Page, like real examples to show on the whiteboard and lots of interactive PDFs. Also, because all my students were proficient at predicting based on their DRA results (shout out to their former teachers!), for the first time ever I’m not starting with the unit on prediction. I’m weighing my options of what will give them the most bang for their buck. My students are already so inquisitive that I am scared to teach them questioning (only joking a little here – with this group I will have to find a bunch of new ways to say, “That’s a good question, let’s look it up!”). I am leaning towards the unit on summarizing because almost all of my students struggled with it on their DRAs. I’ll probably mull this over for a week or two!

Week 4

I am happy to announce that all my DRAs are scored, my class profile created. This week I made good on my leftover goals from last week:

Activity: Establish literacy centers and expectations for all during small group work.

I overheard a few my kids talking during snack time about whether certain snacks were healthy. Since our rule is that they can eat a healthy snack, it was open to some interpretation. Inspired by a center I read about in Intermediate Literacy Stations (Maupin House, 2009) I created three literacy centers that gave my students time to read kid-friendly articles about nutrition and  they learned from reading to the articles to read food labels. Here are some pictures to show what we did:

Reading and Evaluating Food Labels

Directions

Laminated Food Labels

What students learned about proteins, carbohydrates and fats

 

 

 

 

 

 

Activity: Review the differences between narrative and expository genres

This was a quickie! I defined narrative as a story, true or untrue with a beginning, middle and end. We discussed other narrative elements such as characters, setting, problem and resolution. I defined expository as a text, true or untrue, that explains, describes or explains something. After I defined each one, I showed some examples on the doc cam and had kids cooperatively sort piles of books into narrative  and expository.

The other new activities for this week include:

Activity: Create an interactive text feature wall.

Done!

Activity: Broaden text feature lessons to include using them to aid comprehension.

Last week I promised to elaborate on some of the cool new materials we created and I used for our new book, Reading the Whole Page. This week I was still focusing on identification and the kids responded well to the lessons. One of my kids blurted out, “Text features rock!” Don’t you love fourth-graders? Anyway, I showed full-color examples of each feature on the interactive whiteboard then had kids write the name of each feature on their little dry erase boards. Ironically, this process reminded a lot of students responding on the old-fashioned slates at the Student History Museum in Sanford where we recently went on a field trip.

Activity: Begin small group work (teacher led)

I used the text feature sorting cards in small group so I could monitor and clarify as students matched examples of the features to their names. There were 21 text features and every single one of my kids was able to accurately match them with just a few tweaks. For those that had confusion, this light scaffolding was all that was necessary.  

Week 3

This week I was playing catch-up a little because I didn’t do such a great job of introducing the strategies last week.  I created two sorts to help my students understand (at least at an entry level) the concepts of predicting, questioning, visualizing, making connections, summarizing, metacognition and clarifying. One sort had terms to match with definitions and the other had descriptions of strategies in use to match with the terms. The sorts really helped students understand what these terms mean and what the strategies look like in action.  Michelle and I are working on the second edition of Comprehension Shouldn’t Be Silent, and both sorts will be in the new book.

This is the point in the school year where we’ve been teaching and giving beginning-of-the-year assessments nonstop and suddenly remember we are expected to give grades. Since it’s important to assess what we are actually teaching, I decided to create an assessment to go along with the metacognitive strategies and stems from R⁵. It looks a little like the genre quizzes from our R⁵ book in that each question requires a word or short answer and students have to both define and use the strategies.  My husband and I both administered it to our classes (he teaches fifth-grade at another school) and some of the answers students gave really blew us away. We invited students to draw a labeled diagram on the back and just had to share this example from his class.  

Because I paused to drive home the metacognitive strategies (and am so glad I did), I didn’t get to all the activities listed for this week.

Activity: Continue writer’s workshop, read-aloud, and R⁵.

Check, check and check. Tuesday night I had students generate a list of words that mean the same thing as sweet. In class on Wednesday we shared our words, talked about them, and put them on a continuum from sweetest to least sweet.

This was in preparation for writing on Friday. To help get them all engaged in writer’s workshop, I shared an “I See” poem. (I am not sure whom to credit with this idea – it wasn’t mine.) I displayed a graphic organizer that looked like this:
 

I see..
I feel…
I smell…
I taste…
I hear…

The final products

I gave each of them some Pop Rocks candies. They observed the candies using all of their senses, then wrote free verse poems. How did my disengaged writers do, you ask? Everyone engaged for the entire time. Some finished before others but all were successful (and a little sticky, I suspect.)

Activity: Have students notice and share when they clarify.

We didn’t limit the sharing to clarifying – during R⁵ kids shared a variety of strategies they used.

Activity: Establish literacy centers and expectations for all during small group work.

I didn’t get to this activity this week. I’ll do it next week for sure.

Activity: Review the differences between narrative and expository genres.

Next week for this as well. Did I mention all the mandatory test we had to do???

Activity: Begin noticing and identifying nonfiction text features.

You may know that our new book on teaching text features, Reading the Whole Page, just came out in August. I am able to do a much better job teaching text features now that Maupin House was kind enough to translate my sticky notes into a professionally designed teaching resource! I’ll spend some time telling how I use these resources a little later. My good friend and awesome first grade teacher, Kim Wilson, will be a guest blogger telling how she used the materials with her little guys as well. Look for that next week.

Speaking of next week, I have some catching up to do…