Primary Chalkboard: ELA
Showing posts with label ELA. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ELA. Show all posts

Guided Reading Strategy to Help Fluency

Guided reading strategy to help with fluency

Hi all, It's Emma from Clever Classroom

Okay, let's talk guided reading for emergent readers.
Reading comprehension and fluency are vital reading competencies for any reader, especially our beginning readers. These leveled reading pointers provide a FUN, hands-on system for your students to grow their fluency. These reading sticks will help children follow and understand the text that they are reading.
When I taught kindergarten I had an inspirational mentor who helped me understand loads of things like: phonemic awareness, phonics, guided reading and spelling strategies. I am so passionate about these aspects of teaching all these years later. She helped me understand 1:1 correspondence with text and how students move from that to sweeping their finger under the text as they read. Finally, students should move away from these two foundations to reading just with their eyes. This was a great framework for my students.

Guided reading strategy to help with fluency and reading competencies
Providing a Concrete System to help Children with Fluency
I found that some of the students needed concrete materials to motivate their reading progress. I came up with a fun way to help my students. Reading pointers aren't new, they have been around for years. I remember using them more that 15 years ago!
Another great idea is to use transparent counters to help students read the word they are pointing too.... anyway....
Providing students with a system will ultimately help them grow and motivate them to keep going. It's kind of like giving them goals to work towards. We all love that, right?
Guided reading sticks - 3 levels to help motivate children and develop reading skills
Different Countries, Different Guided Reading Levels or Systems
I know that different countries use different leveled systems, eg. letter and numbers and some colors. Which system does your state or country use to represent leveled readers?
No matter which system, I am referring to the first emergent and beginning reader levels. You might implement the graduation of pointing, sweeping and eye sweeping slightly different to myself, that's okay, you can decide when to change up the sticks.
What do I Need? 
The sticks are easy and very quick to make. your students might like to help!
I found three different sized popsticks, but you could use just one size if you wanted.
Reading sticks for guided reading. Use three levels to promote reading fluency with emergent and beginning readers.
What are the Three Levels?
One on one correspondence is first. I use this for the first 2-3 levels.
Guided reading idea fluency with 3 levels of reading sticks for emergent readers
I promote reading with a sweeping finger for the next two levels. The best way I thought my students would understand this was with a paintbrush. Woot-woot, it's kind of FUN!
3 levels of reading sticks to match emergent reading progression great idea for Kindergarten first grade and reading RTI
Then finally, I encourage students to be using no fingers, and just their eyes to follow the text as they read. I would invite students to use the eye sticks for one level as a transition to independent eye scanner reading. After this, there are no more sticks!
Guided reading idea to build reading skills

guided reading fluency sticks 3 levels for Kindergarten and first graders
These fun sticks are a great way to help children progress and develop their reading competencies. I hope your students love them too.
Guided reading sticks - 3 levels to help children's developing reading competencies including fluency and comprehension
Thanks so much for dropping by. I hope this idea helps to motivate your students as they develop their reading skills.
Similar Teaching Ideas
You might also like our Reading Reminder Slips which are a fantastic way to communicate with parents and also remind students which skills they are working on at home with their take-home readers.
guided reading skill and strategy reminders  Guided reading reminder slips to help develop reading skills and strategies
 If you're looking for emergent reading centers that are hands-on and that will last the entire year, and are also super-dopper FUN, your students will enjoy these centers and printables. They are matched with kindergarten or emergent reader skills set for both reading and writing. Click the image to see more.
I can read center activities to last the entire year   Kindergarten reading books and activities
Learn to read and write activities for kindergarten
Thanks so much for reading, I do hope it helps.
If you are a mad word work and reading nut like me, then you might like to join me over on my blog; Clever Classroom.

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Thanks for dropping by. 

Emma

Interactive Notebook Set-Up

I am writing this blog post to see the different ways that interactive notebooks are used in the classroom. I am currently in a new school that does their notebooks a little differently than the way I am used to. 

I am going to show you the way that I did interactive notebooks last year, followed up with the way that I do interactive notebooks this year. I would love to hear feedback on how you do them in your classroom!


Last year's set up-
Used: 
-1 inch binder 
-Filler paper
-Scissors and glue
-Started with spiral notebooks, but stopped (1 inch was great!)


 
We worked on our phonics notebooks.
(Yes, shame on me, I don't have kid pictures, so I included my own work. Haha!)
However, you get the idea. We worked on interactive notebooks that included flip flap pieces and the students worked on one on with their paper and work.  
These come from my Interactive Phonics Notebook.


 
Here, my students were working on their math flip flap pieces. 
They were writing about their math work.
I made these pieces to help break up their steps for writing about math. 
Above- They are writing the steps of how to add tens and ones. 
Below- They are lifting the flaps to show examples of HOW to add 2-digit, then writing about their steps. 
(These aren't in a product for sale YET. It's a project I've been slowly building!)




 
And lastly, we have our Reading Response pieces. I was blessed last year to have volunteer moms who would help with the cutting and gluing so that my 15 minute Daily 5 stations weren't taken over by students cutting and gluing. These pieces are all types of reading response pieces, asking characters, events, predictions, etc. 







This year's set up-
Used:
-Composition Notebook
-Pre-cut pieces (by teachers) and Tape

Our district uses a similar outline throughout all schools. 
Our school uses the same outline for grades 2 through 5. We are introducing these notebooks to the students this year and they will have the same setup through fifth grade. They are called Interactive Content Notebooks, but we have one for each subject, so it covers all areas! 

 
Sorry! I was trying to give your neck a workout! 
You see in the sideways picture an example of our input/output page. 

We started with a table of contents.
I do really like this! Every time we add an entry in our ICN, we label what we are working on and the page numbers. 

First, we start with our target. We write the target together. This isn't expected in second, but we tried it on our first experiment. I think we will wait til the end of the year to pick target writing back up again. It took lots of time to get it copied for some students! I want to spend more time on the work! 

Now comes the input, which is usually a guided piece that practices the skill or target we are working on that day. Here, we are recounting events and how a character responds to an event. 

Output comes next. This is our short answer/constructed response/extended response/etc. goes. This is where students work on their own. We have a school wide extended response expectation, which involves topic sentence, detail sentence, further support sentence 1, further support sentence 2, and conclusion. It's been an adventure with our seconds this last few weeks starting these, but we're getting them ready for third! 




So, I would love to know! 
How does your school use notebooking? 
Are you more free-flowing, cut and glue, flip-flap type of notebook teacher?
Or are you a structured input/output type of notebook teacher?  


Thanks for reading! 
~Jessica
   @   

Anchor Charts for ELA

Hello everyone! I am so excited to be back again blogging for The Primary Chalkboard! I feel like things are FINALLY becoming manageable again after the Back-to-School season…well, manageable at school. Definitely NOT manageable at home! With a football coaching hubby and 3 kiddos who are involved in after school activities 6 days a week, let's just say I am in dire need of a housekeeping and chef :)

But I digress. Today I wanted to talk about anchor charts. Anchor charts have been around a LONG time, before they had that cute name. I think the beauty of anchor charts is that they help kids remember things after the lesson. They are a constant reminder of past lessons and skills you want students to be able to use successfully and consistently. The problem, though, is that kids have to learn HOW to use these wonderful instructional tools. Simply placing them on the walls doesn't mean a transfer to your kiddos.

Bare Walls Do Not Equal Unprepared
I always start off my school year with pretty bare walls. Yes, it does pain me when I walk by and see beautifully decorated rooms all around me. And I do feel totally unprepared.  BUT, I do know that eventually my walls will be full and just as beautiful. It will just take some time. When I first began teaching, I would put so many charts on the wall that I wanted my kids to refer to, but the problem was that they weren't using the charts. I finally realized that in order to get my kids to USE the charts, we needed to create them TOGETHER. Otherwise the kids really don't have any idea what is on those charts, and what they are supposed to do with the information. And I realized that I could put EXACTLY what my kids needed on those charts. Bonus!

This year I am teaching 6th grade advanced ELA. So, it's really weird to only be focusing on ELA (even though I am pulling in science and social studies topics), but I have also found I am able to put so much more ELA info on my walls, I love it! We have been in school for about 6 weeks now, and my walls are slowly getting decorated. I decided that with my 6th graders, I want THEM to create the anchor charts….which is going very slowly! But I think it will be worth it in the end because they will have a sense of ownership.

Figurative Language Anchor Charts
Our focus the first few weeks of school was figurative language. We spent about 3 weeks learning about the different types of figurative language and practiced revising our writing to include figurative language. I also had my students make this FREEBIE flapbook to put in their writing notebooks so they had a good reminder of each type of figurative language we studied. I also felt like my kiddos needed some visuals on the walls to serve as reminders to include figurative language in their own writing. I always tell my kiddos that one of the few times it's OK to steal is in writing. Not plagiarize, but the best way to improve as a writer is to read and model your own writing after those authors whom you admire and love. So instead of having creating a chart for each type of figurative language and writing examples of that type on it, I decided to leave the anchor charts bare except for the figurative language type.


I told my students that whenever they read a text and came across an AMAZING example of figurative language, they needed to write that example on the corresponding chart. This way they have a grab-bag of model sentences they can use in their own writing. They can snag an idea from these charts and tweak them for their own writing. I tell my students all the time that they need to take risks in writing, but usually it's not that they don't want to take a risk. It's just that they don't know HOW. I am hoping these charts will encourage my students to take a risk with using figurative language in their own writing. I will admit, the anchor charts are pretty bare still, but I am hoping that my kiddos will add to them as time passes.



I am also planning on adding an anchor chart for Grabber Leads, too, so that when students read an AMAZING grabber lead, they can write it on the chart. They can then write a similar grabber lead using the examples on the chart, if they need to borrow one. So many anchor charts, so little time!

Thanks for stopping by and reading my post. I would love to hear how you involve students in creating your classroom anchor charts! Until next time, happy teaching!

Heather