Friday, September 5, 2014

Leaving Tracks of our Thinking

This week we are working on monitoring comprehension.  I have been modeling how to stop and think about reading and also write about what we are reading.

I used this book:

Strategies That Work
By- Stephanie Harvey and Anne Goudvis


This book has a lot of great lessons geared towards 3-5.  I used a lesson called "Following the Inner Conversation."  We used the mentor text: Gleam and Glow by Eve Bunting.  I love this book and the kids really enjoyed it too!


After a little modeling, the kids began to keep track of their own thinking on sticky notes.

A few days later, we went back to the text to dig a little deeper.  We did a close reading activity with just a portion of the text. I just took the very last page of the text. I read it aloud to them first as they followed along.   Then, each student used their own copy to read it again on their own and highlight the sentences that were meaningful to them and important to the story. The kids then used sticky notes to write about why the highlighted portions were so meaningful. We added this to our reader's notebooks.


Later, we went back to the text and read it one more time and just thought about why the fish were so important in the story and what would have happened if the fish were not there when the family returned home.  The class wrote their own responses and turned it in for a grade!  I used a rubric to grade the responses.

Here's the Gleam and Glow pages we used!



I used this page as a guide for discussion during the lesson.

Gleam and Glow Discussion Guide



Here's the rubric I used to grade their responses.  (I use this rubric to grade most of our reader's responses.)