Literature Circle Models After experimenting for many years, I discovered an approach that's easy, fun, and effective. I refer to it as Classroom Book Clubs because it's a more relaxed method of doing Literature Circles that doesn't involve roles. You can view a narrated slidecast to this model by scrolling down to the Classroom Book Clubs section. On this page you can also learn about different types of Literature Circles. I've had some success with all the models below, but all models haven't been successful with all groups of students. Read through the various descriptions and find something that feels right to you. Ways to Structure Literature Circles Classroom Book Clubs - My favorite method at the moment is a flexible approach to Literature Circles that does not require the use of extensive handouts and assignment booklets. Classroom Book Clubs I love this model because it's a very flexible and fun approach. Mini Literature Circles (Using Leveled Readers) Literature Circles with Roles
Reader's Workshop This website is designed and maintained by Karen A. McDavid © 2004. Ideas, content, activities, and documents for this website are copyrighted by Karen A. McDavid and should not be copied or downloaded without permission. All graphics seen throughout this website should not be removed, copied, or downloaded. You may download the banner below with a link back to this site. Graphics by Comprehension Strategies - Making connections, questioning, inferring, determining importance, and more from Strategies That Work, Mosaic of Thought, and Reading with Meaning, this page gives you information on the six comprehension strategies known as making connections, questioning, visualizing, inferring, determining importance, and synthesizing.
Synthesize Strategy lessons: Synthesize Students stop often while reading to synthesize the information gained from texts to form opinions, cite evidence to support their conclusions, change perspectives, develop new ideas, and, in general, enhance a personal understanding of the concepts presented in a text. Learning targets I can explain the difference between retelling, summarizing, and synthesizing. Getting started: Are we retelling, summarizing, synthesizing? Below is a silly story I heard on the radio. There once was a squirrel who went into an ice cream shop and asked the clerk, "Do you have walnuts?" "No. The squirrel went away, but came back an hour later and said, "Have you got any walnuts?" The clerk looked at the squirrel angrily. The squirrel went out the door, but in an hour came back again. "I told you we don't have any walnuts. The squirrel went out again but, sure enough, an hour later he was back. The clerk looked surprised. "Great!" Retelling Summarizing Headline summaries
CAFE In our classroom, we will use the structure of CAFE to focus on reading comprehension strategies. During Daily Five, two of our whole class mini-lessons will focus on CAFE strategies. I will also meet with small strategy groups and individual students when I finish meeting with guided reading groups. Our CAFE board shows the four strategies we will focus on- Comprehension, Accuracy, Fluency, and Expanding Vocabulary. This is our CAFE board. Here are the skills we will work on this year: Your TICKET to teaching comprehension! A Photo Tour of my Pensieve Don't try and implement this without reading the book by The Sisters! Inferencing Mini Lessons These lessons were modified and modeled from ideas in Strategies that Work by Harvey and Goudvis and Reading With Meaning by Miller. I am currently working on my Masters. One of my projects for a class was to create this HUGE unit using the Understanding By Design Backward Planning Model. I decided to create a unit about inferencing because this is an area I struggled with last year and was not really pleased with how I pulled it all together. Click here to see a content map of all the objectives taught in this unit. Books Used in the Unit Mini Lesson Plans Printable Copy of Plans Printable and Activities Used in This Unit Other Links and Resources Books Used In This Unit: A Study of Eve Bunting: Train to Somewhere Smoky Night The Blue and the Gray Fly Away Home Books for the Browsing Box: A Day's Work The Wednesday Day Surprise Gleam and Glow How Many Days to America: A Thanksgiving Story Dandelions Red Fox Running Cheyenne Again The Wall Dreaming of America: An Ellis Island Story A Picnic in October
Blooming Orange: Bloom's Taxonomy Helpful Verbs Poster Here’s another poster to help get you thinking about how you can apply Bloom’s higher-order thinking skills with your children. This poster shows the segments of an orange with each segment relating to a thinking skill and some helpful verbs to serve as prompts. While there are many more verbs that we could have added, we felt that including just seven in each segment would make them easier to remember (For more information, see Miller’s paper “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information.” We thought it would be interesting to depict the verbs in a circular form as opposed to a hierarchical list, given that these skills don’t often occur in isolation and are interconnected. We went through several concepts including a wheel, a pie, and an apple, but somehow the orange seemed to work best when we put everything together. For those of you who prefer it, we’ve also created a grayscale version of the poster. Download the pdf’s here:
Dr. Seuss’s Sound Words: Playing with Phonics and Spelling ReadWriteThink couldn't publish all of this great content without literacy experts to write and review for us. If you've got lessons plans, activities, or other ideas you'd like to contribute, we'd love to hear from you. More Find the latest in professional publications, learn new techniques and strategies, and find out how you can connect with other literacy professionals. More Teacher Resources by Grade Your students can save their work with Student Interactives. More Home › Classroom Resources › Lesson Plans Lesson Plan Overview Featured Resources From Theory to Practice Boom! back to top Sound Observation Chart: Students can use this chart to spell out sounds they hear on a Website and record related information. Spelling Observation Checklist: Use this checklist to assess the strategies students use as they write out the sound words they hear. Playing with the meaning and spelling of sounds comes easily to children. Further Reading Laminack, Lester L., and Katie Wood. 1996.
Best Books for Tweens The Cat in the Hat - Read & Learn - Dr. Seuss on the App Store CliffsNotes Study Guides: The Hunger Games, Of Mice and Men, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Divine Comedy Inferno, Night, Gulliver's Travels, The Prince and the Pauper, Heart of Darkness, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, A Separate Peace, and more
Interactive Learning Sites for Education - Home Five close reading strategies to support the Common Core I walked in to my first college class, Political Science 101, eager to learn. For my inaugural college assignment, my professor asked the class to read the first three chapters of the textbook for the next class period. That night, I returned to my dorm room, determined to learn everything I could in those three chapters. I pulled out my textbook and highlighter. Growing up, that is what I always saw the “older kids” using when they read a textbook. In my naïve 18-year-old mind, I believed that highlighters must have some magical power that transports the words on the page directly to your brain. However, when I opened my textbook it was unlike anything I had read in high school. I shrugged, pulled out my highlighter and started highlighting. I quickly realized that I had no real game plan for reading this complicated textbook. Flash forward to my first few years of teaching. Last fall, I attended an AVID workshop about critical reading strategies. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. · Ask questions.
Top 10 Picture Books for the Secondary Classroom As a teacher of future English teachers, I am always trying to open my students’ eyes to the wonder and power of the picture book, both as an art form and as a terrific instructional tool for the secondary classroom. Being students of capital-L literature, my teacher-babies sometimes forget to consider these compact and powerful texts. It’s the best way I know to get numerous, diverse and COMPLETE texts into students’ minds. It’s hard enough to squeeze out the time in the overcrowded middle and high school English curriculum to read young adult and classic novels, but with picture books, you can read the entire work aloud, model the focus you want students to concentrate on, let them explore the craft, have the discussion, and even try it out in their own writing–all in one period! So here, in no particular order: my top ten. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. Nerdy friends, you are never too old for picture books–I feel like you know that!