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…