Making Predictions

My third graders and I worked on making predictions these past two weeks. I began by reading aloud the book Suddently! by Colin McNaughton. This book is perfect for making predictions, but it can be hard to find at bookstores. I recommend ordering it from Amazon. You will not regret it.

As I read aloud, we completed an anchor chart together. We paused throughout the story to record our predictions, evidence for those predictions, and what really happened.

Then students read City Green by DyAnne DiSalvo-Ryan. With this book, students read a few pages at a time independently in a whisper read as I went around and listened. At this time, I assisted students with any word problem-solving. Students also created a chart similar to the anchor chart in the "Strategies" section of their reader's notebooks. As they read, they recorded their predictions, evidence for the prediction, and what really happened. When I listened to each student read, I also reviewed their prediction chart with them.

The next week, students read The Art Lesson by Tomie dePaola. Students completed another prediction chart in their reader's notebooks. Again, students read in a whisper read while I went around and assisted students and discussed their prediction charts with them. Students improvement in supporting their predictions with evidence from the text was astounding. Their predictions became more sophisticated as well. This lesson also provided time to work on sentence structure when I went around and assisted individual students. For example, you can see that in one of the examples, the student was beginning all of her "why I think that" responses with "because." Another student struggled to remember capital letters and periods.

Both of these books center around young children achieving great things. The students could relate to the characters and really enjoyed the stories. I always love reading The Art Lesson with children because it reminds us that sometimes we get too wrapped up in rules at school and forget about how a "one size all" approach does not work for all children. If Tomie dePaola's teachers had never given him the chance to explore his own creativity, we might not have the many wonderful books we do today. Just an important message to remember!

Infer Meaning of Unknown Words

Our district uses the RTI model. This lesson was used with a group of "Tier 3" 5th graders. For those unfamiliar with RTI, "Tier 3" refers to the last level of intervention before special education referral. This lesson is based on a lesson from Debbie Miller's Reading with Meaning. (One of my favorite books! A wonderful wealth of resources!)

To begin, the students and I discussed ways to figure out unknown words in text. We came up with the following: use the pictures, what we already know, and other words in the text. I recorded these ideas on our anchor chart.

Then, I read aloud the book The Knight Who Was Afraid of the Dark. This book is full of wonderful, descriptive words for students to infer with. It is also very funny, which the kids really enjoy.

As we read, we identified unknown words in the text and added these to our anchor chart. We inferred the meaning of these words and identified what clues we used to infer. The students correctly inferred the meanings of most of the words. 

The following day, we began reading The Singing Man. This book contains many great words for students to infer with. Students independently read a few pages and identified unknown words. They used the graphic organizer below to infer the meanings of these words. Then we discussed the text and students' inferences together.

The graphic organizer can be found at http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Inferring-Meaning-of-New-Words. Here is a look at one student's work after the first day:

For independent practice, students read the short story "Just a Girl." (found at www.infohio.org) This story describes how a young girl in Yemen proves to her father that she deserves to attend school. Students completed the graphic organizer to infer the meaning of unknown words independently with this story.

Nonfiction Summary

Our state test places a large emphasis on the difference between the structure of a summary for fiction and nonfiction texts. As a result, I developed this lesson to help my fifth grade students with this challenging concept. I used this anchor chart to introduce the basic differences between the two types of summaries. Students glued a smaller copy of the anchor chart into their reader's notebooks for future reference.

We discussed that all summaries include the main idea of the text, the most important ideas, key words, and must be in our own words - no copying! To begin, we focused on the nonfiction summary, which seems to be easier for the students to grasp. I selected several great nonfiction articles to practice this skill. For the first article, we read and discussed the text together. Then I showed the students an example summary I had written. We went through the summary and identified the main idea and a sentence explaining each subsection. Then, we circled all the key vocabulary words that I used. For this part, I used the article "Masters of Disguise."

This is an article from Scholastic News that I found at www.infohio.org. I love using articles from Scholastic News because they have clearly labeled vocabulary words and divide the article into labeled subsections. For the next article, we completed the summary together in students' reader's notebooks. We used the article "Bionic Animals." This is another high-interest article from Scholastic News, which can be found at www.infohio.org.

Students completed the third summary independently. For this part of the lesson, I used the article "I Use a Robot to Go to School." (You guessed it! Another article from Scholastic News that can be found at www.infohio.org.)

Students wrote their independent summaries in their reader's notebooks. Once students had proofread their summaries, they switched with another student. This student used a post-it note to evaluate the other student's summary. They wrote about strengths and weaknesses within the summary and then placed the post-it in the student's reader's notebook. When finished, I reviewed all the summaries. Stay tuned for fiction summaries!