For today's Cyber Monday post, I thought I'd share Carol Hurst's Children's Literature Site.  There are synopses and reviews of thousands of children's books as well as ideas for classroom discussions and post-reading activities.  I have found this resource especially helpful because I've been looking for nonfiction books to use in the primary grades.  The Common Core Standards encourage us to provide children a more even balance between fiction and nonfiction texts.  The earlier children are introduced to nonfiction at appropriate reading levels, the less intimidting nonfiction will be as they grow as readers.  But there is also plenty of great fiction to be found here too, along with a free newsletter. 
 

 Happy teaching!  Enjoy!

February Currently

Okay folks, it's time once again to link up with Farley at Oh boy! 4th Grade!  She always has such cool stuff going on over there.  Here's my Currently.

I'm still feeling a little behind, but I'm slowly catching up.  I just can't believe it's February, and the school year is like more than half over! 

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!

More Christmas literature

Hi all, just thought I would recap a quick Christmas themed lesson that I conducted with my 3rd grade English learner this afternoon.  She is at the early production level.  I used the book, Noni, the Christms Reindeer.  She isn't strong enough to help pull Santa's sleigh, but she sure is good at filling it. 


Santa uses many synonyms in this book to describe the toys Noni brings back. 

Good

Great

Grand

Marvelous

Tremendous

Outstanding

Fantastic

Some of these vary in intensity, according to how excited one is becoming.  We started the lesson sharing ideas about these words and talking about their similarities.  I asked my student to think of things she liked, and then to think of things that she really, really liked!  We used these words and demonstrated the facial expressions that may accompany them.   Then, we began to read the book together, as shared reading.  In addition to talking about how Noni must feel at different points in the story, we made predictions and kept looking out for the above synonyms. 

I also wanted to share one other Christmas book I discovered.  This one is told from a mouse family's perspective, observing all of the goings-on in the human family with which they live.  I think this book is great for English learners, because it introduces them to many common holiday words and concepts.  You might have to help them over words like "Mistletoe".  If you have some real  mistletoe to bring in, you could show them how it is hung. 

Enjoy, and hope this helps.