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Friday, December 28, 2012

Professional Development


I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday and is getting plenty of rest! Over the break, I like to catch up on my reading. I just finished Improving Comprehension with Think-Aloud Strategies by Jeffrey D. Wilhelm.  I found this book at my local library while browsing the education section. Although the book was published in 2001, I still found several useful ideas. This book focuses on making your thinking visible to your students. The author demonstrates "think-aloud" using the major comprehension strategies and the basic gradual release of responsibility model.


Some of my other favorite professional development books include:





Everyone loves Fountas and Pinnell! Initially, I was only certified to teach grades PK - 3. This book helped me make the transition to teaching reading in the upper grades when I received my endorsement for grades 4-5. This book is full of amazing resources. Every time I read it, I come away with something different.






This has to be one of my favorite professional development books of all time. We used this book in one of my college courses, and I have reread it several times since. I had the great pleasure of hearing Debbie Miller at the Reading Recovery Conference in 2011. Is anyone else excited to read the second edition?





This is another hit by Debbie Miller! With this book, Debbie really forces you to reflect upon your own teaching and focus on your core beliefs.











My district led a book study on Strategies That Work last school-year. I really enjoyed reading and discussing the ideas presented in this book. I am constantly going back into this book to pull ideas. As an intervention teacher working with several grades, this book provides several strategy lessons that can be differentiated for a multitude of grade levels.



This is another great resource that I found while browsing the education section at my local library. I am definitely glad that I found it! This book really forced me to think about my own reading practices. I love how Donalyn Miller reminds us that a reading teacher needs to love reading herself before trying to get others to love reading.

Now I would like you to share some of your favorite professional development books! Please complete the survey below! 

Saturday, December 22, 2012

Character's Feelings

For this lesson, I analyzed character's feelings with my fifth graders. By discussing character's feelings, we were able to investigate how characters changed throughout a story, lessons the characters learned, and predict how the character might act in future situations. Before beginning this lesson, I had already discussed the difference between character feelings and character traits with my students. Character traits describe the character over the long term, whereas feelings change frequently and are in response to certain events.

As with most of my lessons, we began with an anchor chart. This lesson emphasized how to provide evidence from the text to support our answer choices. The anchor chart helped students find ways to prove how they knew a character felt a certain way. For this proof, we used: how the character acts, what the character says, and what the character thinks. 


For the modeling portion of the lesson, I read aloud Chrysanthemum. I picked out certain events from the story and added them to the anchor chart. Then, we identified how Chrysanthemum felt in response to that event and provided evidence from the text to support our answer. I modeled the first example for them. 


The completed anchor chart is pictured below. For this lesson, students were not allowed to use the feelings sad, happy, or mad. I knew that they could do much better! They came up with some descriptive feelings, such as depressed and cheerful. I was very proud of them.


For guided practice, the students independently read the short story Shells by Cynthia Rylant. In this story, a boy's parents die and he has to live with his aunt. At first he does not like his aunt, but as the story continues their relationship begins to change. Together we completed a graphic organizer very similar to the anchor chart. 


A copy of the graphic organizer can be downloaded at http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Character-Feelings-Graphic-Organizer. For the independent practice portion of the lesson, students read the short story Egg Drop Soup from a previous issue of Highlights magazine. This story is about two friends who work together on a school project and get into an argument. The students really related to this story and had a lot of great connections. (They had actually just picked science fair partners.) A copy of the story can be downloaded at http://web.ebscohost.com/sas/pdf?vid=3&hid=10&sid=844bf3a4-c727-4282-80f6-d1775a3e8ec1%40sessionmgr10. (login required)


Following each story, we also completed a short answer question in our reader's notebooks. For Chrysanthemum, we predicted how Chrysanthemum would act the next time someone made fun of her name and gave a reason why. With Shells, we wrote about how the main character Michael changed throughout the story. For Egg Drop Soup, we wrote about the lesson the two girls learned. Overall, the lesson on character's feelings provided many opportunities for rich character analysis.

Friday, December 14, 2012

Sequencing

I have been working on sequencing with my third graders this past week. We had previously focused on putting events in order, but this lesson highlighted the use of sequencing words. To continue practicing this skill, we read a version of the popular fairy tale Cinderella. This also gave us the chance to review the elements of fairy tales. Some of these elements include princes, princesses, magic, and the phrases "once upon a time" and "lived happily ever after."


I particularly like this version of the classic fairy tale because it has a reader's theater version of Cinderella at the end. The kids really loved acting out the play, except for when the prince had to ask the princess to marry him. We all had a good laugh at that part!

Before reading the story, we discussed some common sequencing words to be on the look out for. These phrases included: in the beginning, next, then, the next day, later, at the end. When students finished reading the story, we went back and discussed which sequencing words/phrases were found in this version of Cinderella.

Then, we worked together to pick out the main events of the story and selected certain sequencing words to create a summary of the fairy tale.


Each main event was written on a notecard. I chose lined notecards to help students with their writing. We folded the notecard in half. On the outside, we wrote the sequencing word. Then, we wrote the event on the inside. We then glued the events in order on a long strip of construction paper.



The students really enjoyed creating these sequencing strips. They added a more creative spin on sequencing.

I also could not resist reviewing cause and effect with this story. Cinderella provides some great examples of cause and effect relationships. I created a graphic organizer that included three of the main events from the story. These events are found in most versions of Cinderella and could easily be used with a different version than the one I used in my lesson.


I listed the causes, and the students and I worked together to identify the corresponding effects.


Here is a look at the graphic organizer and the answer key. You can find your own copy by clicking on the image below. Enjoy!

I am also linking up with Teaching Blog Addict to share this free resource with as many wonderful teachers as possible! I cannot wait to see what everyone else has created!  :)

Freebie Fridays



Friday, December 7, 2012

Seasonal Activities

With the holidays coming up, I wanted to do something extra special with my groups. I feel uncomfortable doing anything too holiday specific, so I decided to focus on the theme of snowmen.

With my fourth grade group, I used a "snowman" as the graphic organizer for a summary. As shown in my previous lessons, I teach summary as the main idea combined with the most important details. This "snowman" graphic organizer includes those very elements. I think the snowman adds a fun twist to the skill.

The original file can be downloaded at http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Snowman-Summary-Graphic-Organizer. For my lesson, I used the short story "The Mystery of the Suspicious Snowman" from Highlights magazine. This story is about a boy who thinks his snowman has come to life and stolen his hot chocolate. In the end, he finds out it was actually his sister! A copy of the story can be found at http://web.ebscohost.com/sas/pdf?vid=3&hid=12&sid=cbbb9d3a-d841-48f7-bae2-c2973c558b4f%40sessionmgr4. (requires EBSCO host login)

With two other groups, I used snowmen to focus on comparing and contrasting. For my third grade group, I read aloud two stories, and then we compared the stories using snowmen for the venn diagram. I chose to use The Snowman and Snowmen at Night. With The Snowman, the students had to tell me what was happening, since the book has no words. This was a great opportunity for students to work on paying attention to details. They had some wonderful descriptions. These stories work well for comparison because they both have to do with snowmen coming to life at night. For my Tier 3 fifth grade group, I read aloud Snowmen at Night and students independently read The Mystery of the Suspicious Snowman. We discussed both stories together and then began completing the snowmen venn diagram.

Here is an example of what the snowman venn diagram looked like before we began filling out the similarities and differences.

A copy of the templates for the snowmen venn diagram and answer keys for the different stories can be found at http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Snowman-Venn-Diagram.

With these lessons, students continued to focus on meaningful skills while having a little winter fun!

Saturday, December 1, 2012

Cause and Effect

The following is a lesson on cause and effect used with my fifth grade groups. To begin, I used an anchor chart to review the concepts of cause and effect with the students. By fifth grade, students have already been introduced to the concept.


Students glued a copy of the top portion of the anchor chart into their reader's notebooks. For the modeling portion of the lesson, I read aloud The Day Jimmy's Boa Ate the Wash by Trinka Hakes Noble. This book has numerous examples of cause and effect relationships. Some of the cause and effect relationships require students to really think because they are not listed in sequential order. For example, the causes for some of the events at the end of the book are found near the beginning of the book. This provided more of a challenge for the fifth graders.


Before beginning, I had already copied down several causes and glued them to the anchor chart. As I read, we paused and identified the corresponding effects. Students wrote the effects on post-its and we added them to the correct spot on the anchor chart. A list of cause and effect relationships for several of the "Jimmy's Boa" books can be found here.

The following day, we moved to the guided practice portion of the lesson. Students read the article Wild Weather from www.infohio.org. (article link - must have district login) This article lists causes of extreme weather conditions and climate change. Together, we completed a graphic organizer identifying the cause and effect relationships from the article. On the graphic organizer, I had already listed the causes. For each cause, I made students go back into the text and underline the cause. I told students we never guess from memory. I want proof.


The next day, for the independent practice portion of the lesson, students independently read the short story Keeper of the Light. This story can be found at www.infohio.org. (aricle link) Together we discussed the story and identified the main events. We then wrote these main events as "causes" on a blank cause and effect graphic organizer. Once again, I made students go back into the text and underline the causes to prove their answers. Students then independently identified the effects of these causes.


This lesson combined both fiction and nonfiction texts and incorporated the "gradual release of responsibility" model. Using a variety of texts provided students with a range of experiences, but also helped keep their interest by avoiding repetitiveness.
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