Reading

With our District's adoption of the Common Core Standards, we have made a conscious effort to do more work with non-fiction text.  We began the year by having students compare fiction and non-fiction text via a Venn Diagram.  

This anchor chart has been referred to all year.  

One of the first non-fiction text projects that we did this year was a study of non-fiction text features.  We found the layout for this project on Pinterest.  We took file folders and folded each side in towards the middle.  We typed up the features we were focusing on and had students use non-fiction texts, find those particular features and copy them onto their non-fiction features projects.  They turned out GREAT!

Another project we did this year was built upon (subtly, we admit!) from a brilliant teacher on Pinterest!  We had students use Scholastic brochures and categorize books according to whether they were fiction or non-fiction texts.  Our addition to this project was to have students add index cards to the bottom of their charts listing features of each type of text.  

The kids really enjoyed perusing the Scholastic fliers, discussing books they wanted to read and organizing the covers.  

THE PENSIEVE

As we wrote about on Our Favorite Resources page, we are both committed to using The Daily 5 and Literacy Cafe as our framework for Reading Workshop.  We LOVE it.  Who doesn't love to see their students completing meaningful work independently, conferencing individually to build, support and push students to become stronger readers and having the data to prove it right at your fingertips!???  Enter The Pensieve.

The Pensieve is Gail Boushey and Joan Moser's organization and assessment binder.  It houses your conferencing notes, assessment materials, CAFE menu goals and strategies and any other materials that support your work.  We LOVE how simple it is to maintain ongoing data without it taking away from instruction!  LOVE, LOVE, LOVE.

 We've already setup NEXT YEAR's PENSIEVE!  We have changed the profile page a little bit, created a larger form for reading conferences and got pretty binders.  Pretty binders make everything better, right!?