Hey, Mom! Guided Writing
Posted on March 18, 2018Share This Content
teaching with informational texts
Three-phase plan for learning
Posted on January 12, 2018Below is a guide I’ve developed for planning and teaching with informational sources. Each “phase” can be one or more lesson periods (20-40 minutes) based on the needs of your students. My hope is to make teaching with informational sources (texts, video, infographics, etc) more manageable. There’s so much we can do with these sources, …Read more
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When kids ‘mumble read’ a word they don’t know…
Posted on October 10, 2017A few weeks ago I was in a conference with a student reading a book about the sea lizard. When he came to a word he didn’t know, he mumbled the word and kept going. Do you have students that do this? These students are self-monitoring but they lack fix-up strategies. They know when they …Read more
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Orally rehearsing with key words can boost writing
Posted on April 14, 2017Do your students struggle to compose sentences about nonfiction topics that make sense or sound right? Do they lack structure at the sentence and paragraph level? Here’s a few tricks I’ve been trying with small groups of late-early and transitional stage readers. As part of a conversation generate key words they will use to orally …Read more
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Discourage students from taking notes like this. Here’s why.
Posted on March 22, 2017If students are reading multiple texts on a topic and taking notes on each of those sources, I require that (or strongly suggest) they write notes in phrases–just enough words to help them remember what they learned or what the author was saying or the student’s response to information. In most cases, I strongly encourage …Read more
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Think-pair-share can go awry. Yup.
Posted on January 15, 2017I’m a strong believer in students talking about what they’ve learned from informational texts. Good conversations about nonfiction have the potential to – increase students’ understanding of texts, help students clarify their thinking, help students expand their understanding, build bridges to stronger writing. But a critical component is teacher support. Without teacher support, even our …Read more
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“I underlined all the words! They’re all important!”
Posted on October 12, 2016When annotating, do your students underline most of what they’ve read because they think “it’s all important”? Maybe they’ve underlined that much because they don’t know how to determine what is important? Below are a few tips and photos from a demo lesson I gave to tackle this issue. And, yes, I used the pasta …Read more
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Dear Accelerated Reader, It’s not fair.
Posted on August 22, 2016Dear Accelerated Reader, It’s not fair that you assign fewer points to nonfiction than fiction. For example, students who read The Hunger Games (GL 5.3) get a whopping 15 points, but students who read Titanic: Voices from the Disaster by Hopkinson (GL 7.4) receive a measly 7 points. Yes, Titanic is only 289 pages compared …Read more
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Critical Thinking Across Multiple Texts – Choosing Texts Part 2
Posted on June 20, 2016I’m hooked on the art of locating and layering texts for students to read and think across. In my last entry, I described a series of lessons where middle school students used an evolving definition of “honorable” to think critically about the role of medieval age warriors and modern warriors. We chose text excerpts and …Read more
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Critical thinking across multiple texts – Part I
Posted on June 3, 2016In a 7th grade social studies class I visited a few weeks ago, the students used an evolving definition of “honorable” as a lens for reading multiple texts on warriors – ancient and modern. In the image below, the blue text was our original definition. As the students engaged in discussions about what it means …Read more
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“Who will you tell?” This is a conversation I’ve started having with students at the guided reading table before they write in response to an informational source. I usually start by saying something like the following: When you go home tonight and your mom asks about school, you could just say, “It was okay” OR …Read more