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:
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 |
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…
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