Whole Group Reading: Teacher Read Aloud

When we started Literacy First, I was kind of surprised that having a teacher-led read aloud was part of our whole group time.  In the past we'd had our reading series dictate the story we read that week and we had a few novel studies on top of that.  I always did a chapter book read aloud with my class on top of that, but I really didn't think that reading story books to third graders (or older) was all that necessary.  

I've come to enjoy our read aloud time a lot, though, and it's given me a lot more opportunities to read a variety of stories to my students.  We're supposed to incorporate a lot of non-fiction into our read alouds (about 50 or 60%). 

Here are some of the books / themes that we've done this year:

• Friendship
• Pets / Animal Heroes
• Christopher Columbus
• Elections 
• Presidents 
• Thanksgiving / Native Americans
• Christmas
• Penguins 
• Johnny Appleseed
• Martin Luther King Jr. / Civil Rights
• Inventors
• Titanic
• Butterflies
• Ramona Quimby, Age 8
• The Mouse and the Motorcycle
• Muggie Maggie
• Tales of a 4th Grade Nothing
• Charlotte's Web

There are even more I would like to try to do in the future, but I just haven't had time to fit in or plan for!  We also do some weeks where we just read stories and focus on a certain comprehension skill or text structure...  For example, we might spend a week reading books and focusing on a skill like retelling or compare and contrast.  Some themes extend more than just 1 week and the novel studies usually take about 2 weeks each. 

My kids really love the nonfiction books and learning new things through these books.  We're in the middle of our inventors unit right now and we studied old school inventors like Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell and now we're reading about Steve Jobs.  They're loving it!

I wanted to share the reading planner than I created last spring again.  It's been good for planning things out and it's definitely going to help me in doing some better planning for next year!

Reading Theme Planner.pdf 

One of my current goals for now and into the summer is better organizing all of my theme resources.  I'm considering some tubs like these:  

Image via Really Good Stuff

Target also has some similar boxes...  I think these would be perfect for putting my books and files for themes into one common spot and would be super convenient for sharing with my coworkers!

I'm hoping to get back into some school-related posts again in the coming weeks and months.  Sometimes mid-year I get sick of even thinking about school when I'm not there, so blogging about it isn't exactly at the top of my list!

Whole Group Reading: Vocabulary

 This week's focus for whole group reading is vocabulary instruction.  This is probably one of the hardest things for me to try to cram into 10 - 15 minutes of my 60 minute block!  

There's so much research that shows how a strong vocabulary helps students become better readers and builds higher comprehension.  So many of our students aren't exposed to higher level vocabulary outside of school, so it's important for us to give them opportunities to learn new words from a variety of content areas.

I teach vocabulary in several ways...  The first is through the Daily Vocabulary Practice book by Weekly Reader.  I found this at a teacher store when I was out of town, but I you can still find it online.  It has a half page for each day of the week, plus a weekly review.  Each week presents a new vocab theme and ties into a lot of my grammar instruction as well.  Right now, my class is finishing up a section of "science words," which is great for tying things into other subject areas.  

The other book I use is the Word A Day by Evan Moor.  This book just goes through a variety of words that students should be familiar with just for common knowledge.  There are different versions of this book for each grade level and it provides a "script" of sorts for each word of the day.  

My student teacher from last spring introduced me to this style of graphic organizer for vocabulary, so I whipped up my own and had our district copy center bind them into books for the students to use.  This is so convenient!  It took the kids a long time to get into this routine at the beginning of the year, but they're seasoned pros now!  (I'd like to get this into a Power Point or something for next year, but we'll see if that project happens this summer or not!)

I sometimes alternate the Word A Day book with content area words or vocabulary from our read aloud books.  I wish we had time to do all of it all the time, but that's just not possible.  (Although sometimes we do write in these journals during out science or social studies times and use them outside of the reading block.)  

You can see in the first picture an example of how I post our words of the week.  I use my super awesome Target pocket charts and Dollar Tree's word strips (I hoard those things) to post the words, adding them as we introduce them.  

I also use the Evan Moor Take It To Your Seat Vocabulary Centers during my work station time.  Those centers have some fun games and activities for vocab practice.  I'm hoping to incorporate more vocabulary work into my work stations next year since I feel so rushed to put it all in during my whole group block.

I hope this gives you some ideas on teaching vocabulary to your students!  I wanted to share my graphic organizer with you, so you can download the file here from Scribd.  (The cover is also included if you want to turn it into a book!)

Vocabulary 4 Part Organizer

Next week's post on whole group reading will cover our word wall time!  This was one part of Literacy First that I was initially very reluctant about, but that has ended up being a favorite in my classroom!

Happy Saturday!

Whole Group Reading: Language & Grammar

I'm working on doing a "miniseries" on here about what my whole group reading block looks like.  (You can go back and read my introductory post here.)

This week I wanted to share a few things I that use on a regular basis for our language and grammar portion of our reading block.  This accounts for about 10 of the 60 minutes each day.  It's sometimes tough to cram in everything into such a short amount of time, but once we get the routines down things run a lot faster!

Each week (unless it's a short week), we work on a skill from this Grammar & Punctuation book from Evan Moor.  (Click here for shopping info.)  It goes through all of the parts of speech, grammar rules, and proper punctuation use.  Depending on the skill, we do 2 or 3 pages throughout the week and I try to pull at least one other activity to go along with that skill.  I try not to bombard the kids with worksheets, but I do feel as though when it comes to these skills there is a lot of value in having the kids work on writing.

Back in the day (pre-blog and Pinterest) I was really active on the teacher message board site Pro-Teacher. I found TONS of task cards on there for a wide range of skills.  Task cards are great for whole group or small group activities.

I found this Grammar Ad Libs (and a math version as well) on clearance at my local teacher store a few years ago.  These are a super fun way for the kids to practice skills.  I like to tie this in with fluency and have the kids go around and read their final paragraphs with their classmates.  They LOVE these!

I think I picked up these "I Have...  Who Has..." cards at Mardel last summer, but they've definitely been a hit with my kids  this year.  This box includes synonyms, antonyms, homographs, and homophones.  These are great to introduce the week we learn a skill and then go back to throughout the year as review.  (There are several books of "I Have... Who Has..." games 

Another favorite for my students is Boggle.  If you search "Boggle" on Pinterest (click here for the results) you will find tons of stuff for the classroom!  I try to do Boggle on Fridays and sometime tie it in with our skill for the week.  I'll tell the students to try to make as many nouns as possible or something like that.  Other times, just make as many words as possible.  This can be really challenging for some kids, but once they get the hang of it, most kids really love it!

Do you have any activities you like for teaching language and grammar to your students?  I'd love to get some new ideas and suggestions!

Come back next week for some ideas on vocabulary instruction!

60 Minutes of Whole Group Reading

We're currently in the second year of implementation of Literacy First.  To sum it up as simply as can be, we have a lot of assessments and our instruction is divided between 60 minute block for whole group reading and another 60 minutes of work stations (centers and small group instruction).  

I decided I'd tell you a little bit about what my whole group reading block looks like.  In future posts I'll provide more detail on what each of those components look like and the activities we do each week.

Language / Grammar - 10 minutes

Vocabulary - 15 minutes

Word Wall - 10 minutes

Fluency - 10 minutes

Teacher Read Aloud - 15 minutes

Of course some days we devote a little extra time to one component over another, but for the most part, the goal is to hit each one fairly equally.  Thankfully, my schedule this year allows for a little extra time after our designated hour.  At the beginning of the year we always went over our 60 minutes, but now that we have routines and procedures established we're a lot better at sticking to our pacing.  

Next week I'll share what our language and grammar time looks like.  I have to confess this is a really hard thing for me to cram into such a small amount of time each day, but we make it work!

Happy Thursday!