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.