Questions I Will No Longer Answer

I love this idea. I saw a post from The Brown-Bag Teacher that included a list of questions that are asked repeatedly in the classroom on a daily basis. You can post these after the first month or so of school to let your kids know these questions are off limits and they should know how to solve these problems themselves. I am going to start this right away!!!

The Brown-Bag Teacher

One I will add right away is..."What are we going to do?"

Winter Break Reading Challenge

I was going to give this a try to challenge my kidos to read over the winter break.  I'll let everyone know how it goes in the new year.  It is a free download from TeachersPayTeachers if you want to give it a try yourself.

Winter Break Marshmallow Reading Challenge

More Close Reads...

Here are some outstanding close reading activities that are aligned to our old Reading Street books. They supply the text dependent questions, as well as a culminating task. Could be a good supplemental resource. Here is the link:

http://bpscurriculumandinstruction.weebly.com/4th-grade--close-reading-lessons.html

The link takes you to 4th grade materials, but the site includes each grade level.

Cool close reading video.

I did Day 1  of the Because of Winn Dixie close reading activity from Achieve the Core. It went pretty well, the kids liked the passage and the discussion was good. Here is a link to the New York DOE site the has some more ELA units that include close reading.  The link will pull up 4th grade, but the left side of the page has units for K-12.


 Engage NY ELA Units

I.N.K. Interesting Nonfiction for Kids

     I found a blog that has great ideas on using nonfiction text in the classroom.  It is written by nonfiction authors and they give ideas on using their books.  It has TONS of really good ideas on it and I have only scratched the surface...

                                           I.N.K.-- Interesting Nonfiction for Kids

Common Core places a huge emphasis on close reading, and I know I haven't been good at practicing it in the classroom. As a matter of fact, getting the kids to slow down and re-read anything has been a struggle. I found these resource at the Achieve the Core. I think I am going to try the Because of Winn Dixie passages since our reading them is currently animals. 

Achieve the Core Close Reading

I have been thinking about a way to add reading fluency into my learning centers. I have students partner reading, but I sometimes mostly believe they partner up and waste time when I am with my group. I found these fluency drills on the Reading Sage Blog. The stories look engaging, and they are labeled with a lexile score.

I am thinking about pasting them into a Phrased Cue Generator. This automatically adds lines to the text to show students where they should pause or stop when reading. My thoughts are to have them read the cued passage to each other a couple of times, and then time each other reading the text without the cues.

I also want to create some sort of peer scoring sheet with questions such as , " Did my partner sound natural when reading aloud?"  Maybe 5 or so questions just to have some accountability. Any thoughts or ideas? The links to the passages and the phrased cued generator are below.
Reading Fluency Drills
Phrased Cued Generator