We hope everyone had a Happy Fourth of July. The weather here is finally starting to feel like summer. Yeah!!! This week we continued to work on our Henry and Mudge lesson plans for our TeachersPayTeachers store. We are really happy with the way it's turning out and cannot wait to implement it in our classrooms this fall. Below are pictures of the new activities we have been working on.
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| Retelling Bags |
This week in tutoring, Kim and her student began reading Road Trip by Gary Paulsen. It is a fast read that has hooked her student. He can't wait to keep reading. That was her goal--get him motivated to want to read this summer. :) Reading this book is part of the summer reading assignment her student must complete before starting junior high in the fall. Kim and her student read chapters together during the tutoring session, but the student also reads some chapters on his own. Kim found a fun Connect4 2 game on Smart Exchange that she uses to guide her discussions on the chapters they have read on their own. Connect4 is a generic game that you can modify to fit any of your curriculum needs.
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| Pull the screen down to reveal the answer. |
One of the requirements of the assignment is to make a bulleted list of 10-15 main ideas from the book. So Kim created a main idea page that her student completes after reading each chapter. Keeping track of the main ideas will make it easy to type them into a table later.
Next week Kim will share her Tasty Triangle activity that she did with her math student.
Kim did find an awesome website that she wanted to share with everyone. It is filled with fun websites for every subject area--including art--that kids can visit if they finish their work early. Some of the sites may even be appropriate to use during Daily5. It is called kb...Konnected Kids.
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| You have to check this out!!! |
Another interesting article we read was by Timothy Shanahan titled "Common Core Standards: Are We Going To Lower the Fences or Teach Kids to Climb?" As stressful as it has been in trying to gain an understanding of the Common Core State Standards and implementing them in our classrooms, this is another article that has helped us feel confident that our students will be successful with the CCSS through our teaching methods.
It was a great relief to read his statement, "Truth be told, there is little research supporting matching kids with books, and there are even studies suggesting that teaching children from frustration level text can lead to more learning than from instructional level ones." There have been times in the past that we felt the books we had chosen for a guided reading group were too challenging for the readers. We questioned ourselves and each other and often wondered if we should abandon the book. We even questioned the kids and asked them if they felt the book was too challenging, but they always said no they wanted to keep reading it. We knew our discussion questions and projects had to fully support the kids' understandings of these books. In the end, sticking with the books proved to be the right decision. According to formal and informal reading assessments, our students' reading comprehension greatly improved, as well as their motivation to read more challenging books.
Shanahan does clearly state that teachers need to be careful with putting beginning, struggling readers into reading material that is too challenging. This is something we will be aware of as we begin our guided reading instruction in the fall.
Kim and Anne
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