Guided Reading Strategy to Help 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.

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?

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.

What are the Three Levels?

One on one correspondence is first. I use this for the first 2-3 levels.

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!

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!

These fun sticks are a great way to help children progress and develop their reading competencies. I hope your students love them too.

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.

  

 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.

   

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.

You can also follow Elementary Chalkboard to receive updates from more than 30 of our talented teacher-bloggers. 

Click here to follow this collaborative blog. 

Thanks for dropping by. 

Emma

Read Like a Techie - Using your Board for the Ultimate Big Books

Hi, Friends!  It is Autumn from The Primary Techie.  Today I am going to blog about one of my biggest passions - reading books off my smartboard.  This is really the BEST use I have found for my smartboard.  It literally changed the way I read to my kids.  (By the way, you do NOT need a smartboard!  Any board with a projector will work for this!)

This all started with a book about ants and an "ah-ha" moment.  Several years ago, I grabbed a book off my shelf to read to my first graders.  Now, let me start with a little honesty.  I had already read this book to a few classes and I know that kids do not like this book.  Why read a book kids don't like?  I paid like ten bucks for this book and I liked it!  It fit perfectly with the ant theme I was teaching.  How do I know kids didn't like it?  I didn't hold their interest.  Every time I read this book, my class turned naughty (which told me they were bored).  I decided I was going to try it again with this class.  After all, that book was TEN BUCKS!  I started reading and sure enough, the naughty stuff started.  Rolling around, beauty shop, flicking rocks.  It all started happening as I read.  I asked (more to myself than to them) "Why don't kids like this book?" and one of my little guys said, "It is because we can't see it."  It was the most profound "ah-ha" moment for me.  Of course!  They need to SEE it!  I decided at that moment that I was going to scan the pages of the book and read it again on my board.  I worked on it while my kids were at recess.  I scanned each page and then put the images together in a PowerPoint.

I read the book again when they came back.  The difference was A-ma-ZING!  They were engaged and focused.  They were asking questions about the story as I read it.  THEY LOVED THE ANT BOOK!  I immediately noticed a difference in MY reading.  I was not reading TO these kids; I was reading WITH them!  It was so much easier, effortless, and natural to model think-alouds and comprehension strategies.  We were SHARING the book as we never had before.  We stopped to talk about details in the illustrations and text that I never would have mentioned before.  They were actually reading along with the words as I read.  I knew that very day that I needed to scan ALL my books and read to my class in this new way.

That year, scanning books was my life.  I scanned before and after school, during recess and lunch.  If I was not teaching, I was scanning.  I scanned...(are you ready for this?)....800 books that year!  Yee-haw!  I saved each file as the book title.  This makes it so easy for me to find the books I want.  I also created folders on my desktop for each month.  I can easily find Christmas books in my December folder.  This has saved me tons of time plus the joys of NEVER HAVING TO PUT BOOKS AWAY!!!!

But wait!  I don't want to be a party-pooper, but we better talk legalities.  I must tell you that I was quite worried that I was going to go to jail for scanning all these books.  800 books seems like a pretty serious offense, right?  I have a super guilty conscious and I worried about going to jail for scanning books all the time.  I knew it was the best way to read to my class, but I wasn't sure I was willing to go to jail for it!  I literally worried that one of my students would mention my scanning to their fathers (I had a couple cop dads that year) and I was going to go to jail.  So, I came clean and asked those cop dads about it.  They assured me that I didn't need to worry about going to jail for scanning books.  I still felt kinda bad, so I asked a judge (guilty conscious strikes again) and he put me at ease.  He said, "Do you worry that you will go to jail for putting music from your CDs on your ipod?"  I told him no.  He said it is the same thing.  As long as you purchased those books and you are using them for your own personal use, you don't need to worry about going to jail.  I felt SOOOO much better after hearing it this way.  When I tell teachers that I have scanned 800 books, sometimes they ask to buy them from me.  This is a huge no-no.  I could NEVER sell or even give away the books I have scanned.  I never-ever-ever post them online or anywhere that they could be copied.  I don't even share my books with my teacher friends.  I am encouraging you to use YOUR OWN books for YOUR OWN classroom.  You don't want to worry about going to jail, right?

Why not just read big books?  Reading from the board is 100% better than reading big books.  While big books are bigger than regular books, they are so much smaller than my board.  It is also such a pain in the patootie to turn the pages, hold the books, and don't get me started on storing them.  What about ebooks?  Now, you certainly can buy ebooks and save yourself tons of time and energy.  I chose to scan my books because I had such an extensive library and I could not justify buying digital copies of books I owned.

I hope this gives you some ideas for incorporating digital books in your classroom.  If you want to read more about scanning books, click here to visit my blog.  Thanks for reading friends.
Until next time,

Engaging Strategies for Integrating Reading in Social Studies

Hi everyone! I am so excited today is my blogging day at Primary Chalkboard! I am Heather from 2 Brainy Apples, and I am so excited to be teaching middle grades social studies this year! There is a LOT of content in our 6th grade SS curriculum. Lots of facts, lots of geography, lots of everything! And being an ex-elementary teacher, I believe that integration of reading into social studies is a non-negotiable. But reading passage after passage can get downright BORING. Even if the content is interesting, my students are sitting through 7 55-minute classes a day. If they are with me first thing in the morning, they may not mind sitting and reading....but, if they are with me at the end of the day, this is the last thing they want to do. And I totally understand how they feel. How do we feel after an all day professional development or meeting where we sit most of the time? I am ready for a nap! Or I am so focused on how much my bum hurts, I don't pay much attention. Knowing that reading is necessary, I decided to mix things up a little bit for my kiddos to keep them engaged and attentive to what they are reading, as well as having them look forward to reading about social studies content.

Photo courtesy of umjanedoan CC license

I like to write my own passages for the social studies content I have to teach. It allows me to make sure I include everything my students should know, I can leave out unneeded info, and I can add in fun facts that they may not have to learn, but it sure does make reading it a whole lot more fun! Even though I write the passages, I do get that my students may not be as excited about reading them as I would like. We do a lot of close reading, too, and this can be exhausting on their minds! I am on the team that doesn't believe in making my students close read everything I put in front of them. OVERLOAD. Some days my students might close read a paragraph. Other days they may close read half of the passage. Some days they will close read all of the passage. The goal is to get students to close read all on their OWN, without me having to tell them to do it. Easing them into, not forcing it will help them see how much close reading does help them understand the text, which will result in students choosing to close read the entire text without prompting be me. Lofty goal? Yes. Totally realistic? Absolutely! Has this happened in the past? Yep! 

Movement Reading

One way I bring novelty into reading is by taking the passage my students need to read and cutting apart the paragraph. Then I hang each paragraph in a different place in our hallway for them to find.
They are still reading the passage, completing the activities that go along with it, but they are moving about the hallway. There's something about just being up and moving, reading one paragraph at a time that really engages them! I do this with passages that have paragraphs that don't need to be read in chronological order. Otherwise it would be very difficult for the students to glean the meaning from the text. One passage I did this with was the passage I wrote about air pollution in the United Kingdom (one of our standards addresses environmental issues). I wrote the passage with 4 headings: overview of air pollution, sources of air pollution, effects of air pollution, what the UK is trying to do to solve the issue of air pollution. There ended up being 3 paragraphs about the effects, 2 paragraphs about the solutions, 1 paragraph about the sources, 1 paragraph about what air pollution is, and a conclusion paragraph. Students did not need to read the paragraphs in order to be able to complete the activity pages I gave to them because it was not a chronological text structure. Students were free to wander the hallway looking for each paragraph that would help them complete the activity pages. I gave students activity pages because I wanted them to be accountable for what they were reading. One activity page was about how smog is formed, one activity page was about the solutions the UK is implementing, and they had to create a foldable with the sources and effects of air pollution. My students were totally engaged the entire 55 minutes because they were able to move at their own pace. They read in chunks, moved, read some more, completed an activity page, moved again, etc. The movement really helped my kiddos I teach at the very end of the day keep from being bored and kept them focused.

Jigsaw Reading

Another strategy I use is the jigsaw method to integrate reading. The next passage I had my students read was about the acid rain issue in Germany. Instead of having my students read the entire passage, I broke them into 8 learning groups because I had 8 paragraphs (each group had about 3-4 students).

Again, because the paragraphs did not need to be read in chronological order, I did not have to worry about students reading a paragraph out of order. If the text structure was chronological, I would have had my students read more than just 1 paragraph of the text in their learning groups to prevent confusion. The headings of the passage were similar to the air pollution passage: what is acid rain, sources of acid rain, effects of acid rain, and solutions Germany is implementing to decrease acid rain. Each learning group had the same paragraph to close read. After they read their paragraph, they then discussed the ideas presented and took notes to ensure they were experts on their information. Once they were comfortable with the information they read, I reassigned them into expert groups. I took one student from each learning group to make 3 or 4 8-person groups, depending on how many students I had in my class for that particular period. Yes, these groups were larger than the first grouping, and sometimes having a large group can be a problem because each student's voice won't be heard. However, since only 1 student (or at the most 2) in each group was an expert on his/her particular paragraph, this wasn't an issue. Students also had 2 activity pages and a foldable they needed to complete while these discussions were taking place, so they knew they needed to be attentive and participate. Each student took time to share his/her information, answering questions the other students may have had about the particular aspect presented. I loved this! I was able to walk around and listen to the conversations taking place, making notes on which students understood the reading and which ones did not. Students having to answer questions to clarify to their classmates is such a powerful learning tool! And the best part? I did not have to teach my students anything about acid rain because they did it themselves. And I guarantee they were more engaged and interested in the topic than if I had led the discussion after they had read every paragraph by themselves. 

I know I am going to be using these 2 strategies a lot more often in my social studies classroom because they kept my students engaged, and they told me that they enjoyed the activities because they weren't sitting at their desks doing it. Sometimes it's the little things in life! Have you tried these strategies in your classroom? I would love to hear about your experiences! 'Till next time!

Heather

Blog
Teachers Pay Teachers
Instagram
Facebook

Intermediate Back to School Tips and eBook FREEBIE

Summer is coming to an end and it's time to start setting those alarm clocks again!  Whether you've already headed back to school or are getting ready to in the next few weeks, the members of The Primary Chalkboard have been hard at work compiling helpful Back to School tips and a FREE eBook!  Below is our Intermediate eBook and our K-2 friends have also created a Primary eBook.  Now you have several resources ready to print and use from day one.  Check them out and have a WONDERFUL school year!

Here are some tips!!

I hope you liked our tips and eBook!

- The Intermediate Chalkies

Sight Word Activities

Hi there, it's Emma from Clever Classroom.


I love creating resources that are a bit different and require an element of interaction, movement and fun.  You can view the interactive/hands-on resources in my store. 

This post has inexpensive center ideas that can not only be used with sight words, but with any word list. 

 Are you always on the look out for cheap and also recyclable materials for your students?  I love collecting and using inexpensive props for hands-on literacy activities.

Bottle tops and ping pong balls fall in to this category! There are so many things you can do with both bottle tops and ping-pong balls.





Use ping pong balls or bottle top lids to create fun, hands-on sight word centers.

Ask staff and students to bring in clean bottle tops.  You could hold a table competition to see who brings in the most tops.  Collect them in a container and write on the top of each lid with a permanent marker.

You can use any word list for the 5 activities mentioned below.

1. 

2. 

 I have created a whole bunch of bottle top activities with record sheets and instruction cards, all of which can be used with any word list. 

3. 

4. 

5. 

Find more of these games in our Bottle Top Games bundle.

For even more sight word ideas, see my blog post.

Thanks for dropping by.

Teaching Kids about Bees- Freebie

Hello, Katie here form Teacher to the Core! Is there anything better than the Springtime? Yes, summer vacation!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  But for the moment the world is blossoming and so are our students!!!

 Bees are fascinating to children, thus making them the PERFECT material for reading, writing, close reading questions, and smart art!

The passage is about  a RR 16, Level H/I, and Grade level 2.0 with questions to test comprehension.  It’s a freebie for you!!! Enjoy my loves!

If you would like to buy this unit it is on TpT. You can click {here}.