One of the biggest goals and focuses for my classroom this month(really, for the next 3 months) is to help my students feel confident and successful about reading and responding to text. So much of their yearly assessments requires them to read text that is on and above grade level---on their own. Yikes, I know! But, the purpose to get students reading and strengthening their comprehension goes so much deeper than that for me. As a teacher, I understand that students will be reading for the rest of their lives, and now, when they are in the lower elementary grades, we owe it to them to help prepare them for such a task. One of the best ways that I know to do this is to expose them to as much text as possible-both fiction and nonfiction. ALL. THE. TIME. Like most elementary teachers, I spend a great deal of time helping my students build a foundation for reading by teaching strategies during the first half of the school year. A majority of our reading lessons are centered around me ...
reading
The Textset Library
If you know me then you know that I am an avid trade books lover. If you don't know me then...Hi! My name is Sarah, and I am addicted to trade books. My love for trade books means that I spend a lot of time and energy reading children's literature, grouping books into "sets", and determining what Common Core skills and strategies can be applied to specific texts so that I can use them to supplement a lot of the instruction across my various content curriculums. Using text sets in the classroom provide teachers with the opportunity to reach out to students' interests, expose them to nonfiction texts, and advance their knowledge about the important individuals who have impacted our world. I just love, love, love all of the opportunities that texts can provide my students. So you can imagine my excitement when the creators of the new site asked me to post a text set! I chose to post a mini text set about biographies. Recently, I have come across ...
Visualizing and Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs
Shew! Times be CRAZY! I keep thinking that my kiddos and I will fall into a consistant classroom rhythm, but it hasn't happened yet. Every time I feel like we are close to one.... something happens, and we take a step back. We will get there though! I just know it! Anyways...our skill for the last two weeks was visualization. My kiddos rocked it. I am so proud! My class loved doing the poems Oh No!, Green Giant, and My Neighbor's Dog is Purple. We also branched out and spent a lot of time reading poems and trade books to help us strengthen our visualizing skills. Here is one of my favorites activities from this skill! I was surprised that most of my students had never read the book Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs and only a handful had seen the movie. So, I hopped on the opportunity and paired this trade book up with a visualizing activity. I read the story to the kiddos but would NOT share the pictures with them. It about killed the kids AND ME to not share the ...
