Welcome to our Favorite Resources Page!! We wanted to share with you some of our favorite "Go To" resources! We found them to be relatively easy reads and fairly easy to implement.
Reading Power by Adrienne Gear (Fiction and Non-Fiction)
Reading Power is one of the most important resources we have found. These texts focus on the vital reading comprehension strategies of connecting, questioning, visualizing, inferring, and transforming. Some students do not intrinsically understand what we mean when we ask them to "make a connection" or to "visualize". Author Adrienne Gear talks about the importance of each of these strategies and how they support our ultimate goal of teaching students how to think about what they are reading. Included are lists of texts to support instruction, graphic organizers that support student acquisition of these skills and a clear overview of how the gradual release of responsibility helps students to be more metacognitive about their reading and their learning. Our students have become more thoughtful readers because of Reading Power. Below is the link to Gear's site as she has tons of information and updated lists of books. http://www.readingpowergear.com
Bringing Words To Life by Beck, McKeown, and Kucan
How do you make vocabulary instruction meaningful? We have long known that vocabulary impacts struggling learners ability to close the gap. We wanted students to not just be exposed to rich vocabulary on a daily basis, but to begin to add new vocabulary to their own language repertoire in a meaningful way.
Bringing Words To Life defines "Tier 2" words as words that are not exclusive to one event, one content, or one situation and that come up often in a students reading. They play an enormous role in a person's ability to comprehend. We began picking words from picture books used in mini lessons or novels used in guided reading. Our objective was to help students use context to define new words, "Tier 2" words, that could then become part of our classroom language. We were stunned to find out how many students did not readily define words like: worry, memory, pretend, and refuse. Students became responsible for recording these words in their vocabulary notebooks and we kept these words front and center for students. We asked students to keep track of how many times they used these new words on a usage chart and relatively seamlessly, students began using these Tier 2 words in daily conversations. As of March 13, 2013 a 2nd edition has been published.
The Literacy CAFE by Gail Boushey and Joan Moser
Literacy CAFE first came to our attention via Pinterest. We kept seeing these amazing posts from people using and loving it! CAFE is an acronym for Comprehension, Accuracy, Fluency, and Expand Vocabulary. These are the categories for independent reading goals for students. This resource gives you specific strategies under each goal to support your instruction for conferencing. No more guessing what to teach a given student. Whole group lessons are focused around the CAFE strategies so all students are exposed to the modeling of every strategy but each student is "assigned" a specific goal (CAFE) and strategy to be focusing on during their independent reading time. Students are made aware of their personal goal and strategy and therefore automatically have ownership of their learning. Amazing, right!?
Given our district's push towards data driven instruction, Literacy CAFE provides lots and lots of data and information to inform your instruction. Your Pensieve binder houses all of your record keeping for each student, including individual CAFE menu and simple, but very detailed reading conference notes. We've expanded on this Pensieve binder idea by adding other documentation important to our instruction. The students love our CAFE program and can tell you exactly what goal and strategy they are focusing on.
The authors, known as the 2 Sisters, are Gail Boushey and Joan Moser have written an easy to read and relatively easy to implement resource. They have included everything you need to get started and also maintain an online website with more information and support. http://www.the2sisters.com
You can also find many resources for the CAFE board on http://www.teacherspayteachers.com.
The Daily 5 by Gail Boushey and Joan Moser
The Daily 5 is connected to the Literacy Cafe, also developed by the 2 Sisters. Managing LA time and setting up a classroom conducive to reading conferences is challenging. We found that even though we have a 2 hour LA block we still ran out of time and struggled to get everything in. The Daily 5 consists of 5 independent activities: Read to Self, Read to Someone, Listen to Reading, Work on Writing, and Word Work. Students have ownership of their learning and make their own choices in how they will use their time within the confines of those 5 choices. The goal of the Daily 5 is to promote independence and build reading stamina. While students are participating in rotations, you are able to conference or meet with small groups. At the end of each rotation, we have mini-lessons, so in any given LA period, we are able to have 4+ conferences and 4 mini lessons. How awesome is that! We found lots of resources for D5 on http://www.teacherspayteachers.com. And the link for the 2 Sisters website: http://www.the2sisters.com.
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