Dynamic Characters freebie

This week, my fourth-grader and I have been exploring a few books by Particia Polacco, especially Chicken Sunday and Babushka Baba Yaga.  Both of these books demonstrate a theme of acceptance and looking beyond prejudice.  Both have characters whose attitudes change over the course of the story.  That's why I created this Dynamic Characters Chart  Sorry it's rather plain, not all full of cute-ness ;(  Oh well, one day I'll have the cute-ness factor figured out.

This comes just in time to link up with All Things Upper Elementary for the Free For All Linky Party!


Hop on over and get yourselves some freebies that everyone is so kind to share.

Happy teaching!

Predict-o-Gram Freebie

This week, I learned a new word study strategy from my Foundations of Reading class.  It's called Predict-o-Gram.  The idea is that when a handful of familiar and unfamiliar words are presented to students, they predict where they will appear in the book to be read.  This helps students to think about the context.  I made a little freebie to demonstrate this strategy Here  (Does anybody know how to link to the document with the image??)

Steps for using this strategy:
1.  Decide on 6 - 10 words from the book, which are important to the understanding of the text.
2.  Show them to students, and use them in context.  (You could have students turn-and-talk to use them in sentences with a partner).
3.  Have students predict whether the words will be used to describe the characters, the setting, the problem or the solution, and place them on this recording sheet. 
4.  Adfter reading, confirm if predictions were correct. 

This could either be used in a large-group mini-lesson, or in small-group guided reading. 

Note:  Some of this information was paraphrased from Figure 8.11 on P. 262 of Nettles (2006) Comprehensive Literacy Instruction.  Enjoy!

Cyber Monday... I'm back!

Hello again, I have been neglecting my posts just trying to get caught up after the holidays.  I am in my second semester of graduate school, taking two courses; one covers the Florida accomplished practices, or FEAPs, and the other covers the foundations of teaching reading.  In discussions with my classmates, I ran across this great resource from The Los Angeles Office of Education  This is a varied list of phonemic awareness assessments for primary students.  I would suggest using these as formative assessments to be used for forming groups and planning systematic instruction.  There are detailed instructions for administering each, and some even have video demonstrations!  Best of all, it looks like they don't take very long, and we can frame them as games!  YAY! ;) 

Enjoy!