Displays 2013-2014: Reading

I'm nearly done with the displays for my classroom.  Today I laminated a lot of instructional materials.  Hopefully the printers will be hooked up to the wireless internet by tomorrow so I can print all the stuff I bought at the TpT Back to School sale.
I have some new displays for Reading and some old favorites.  Of course, I had to start with the CAFE Menu with new polka dot border and matching header.  I love the magnetic paw prints that hold the border in place.

Opposite the CAFE Menu is my primary teaching area.  I have the easel to work with the whole class on the carpet.  I can easily transition to small groups with the table right next to me.

Last year I moved away from a Math CAFE Menu and found that I really missed it.  So this year it is back.  The hardest part was dealing with the big bulletin board in the middle of the wall.  I'm still not 100% sure that I like the way it is now with fact fluency being the center of attention.  I'll have to see how it works as the year goes on.
 

This new bulletin board will support my new school year resolution to emphasize vocabulary instruction more.  Right now it's just blank with the heading "Word Nerds".  Next to the bulletin board is a list of the CCSS vocabulary standards.

The Theme Board is not new to my classroom.  The idea comes from master teacher Beth Newingham.  I use the stories that we read as a class that are part of my basal series.  After we finish a story, we debate and then vote on the theme. We put a picture of the cover of the story under the theme we decide.   The first few times it is very challenging for students to do this.  As the year progresses they get better and better.

 

This year I added "Got Character?".  The plan is to start by labeling the emotions with different synonyms to expand the students vocabulary for describing characteristics.  Then I'm going to do something very similar to the Theme Board where we will post the name of the character beside the characteristic. 

The last change was the Super Improvers Wall (see www.wholebrainteaching.com).  Previously the colored card system for misbehavior and the reward system of drawing stars in index cards were in two separate locations.  To make room for other interactive displays, I needed to combine the two systems.  For more information on each system, please download Chris Biffle's free ebook or watch his inspiring videos.  

 

One last tip/trick:  I don't know about you, but I just can't seem to get stickers to stick on my cubbies.  They have so much sticker residue built up over the years it's just not working.  My cheap trick is to cover the sticker with clear packing tape.

 

I turn down one top corner to make the tape easier to remove at the end of the year.  Voila!













Meeting the Needs of Advanced Students

     As much as I love Daily Five, I do miss the guided reading groups from the past.  I felt I accomplished a lot when I got to see two or three groups each day.  There are times that I would like to meet with more than one group, but I haven't been able to get my head around how I could make that happen.  That is until I purchased this new book by Evan-Moor:

 (This book comes in several different grade levels.  

Click HERE and it will take you to Amazon for more information.)

     I am a big fan of Evan-Moor's learning game books.  They have books for Reading, Vocabulary, Science, Writing, Math, and Geography.  All the materials are in full color and ready to use, which makes the games extremely quick and easy to put together.  They are also one of the few publishers that have learning games for the upper elementary grades.  

     In addition to the learning games in this book, it has answer keys and, most importantly, short assessments for each game.  It was the assessments that really got me thinking.  My advanced students are very hard-working and conscientious.  They are willing and capable of playing a game independently, but just having them play a game unsupervised does not hold them accountable enough.  So, using this resource, I decided to assign them a game each day, have them complete the matching assessment, and check themselves using the answer key.  The short assessments will keep them accountable for learning and the self-checking component will make it less work for me. :)

     The end of the year is a great time to try out new strategies that you may want to adopt for the entire year next year.  It's especially important during the "doldrums" after high-stakes testing to keep students motivated for the rest of the year.  Changing things up a bit can breathe new life into you students.  

     What kinds of things are YOU trying out in the last few weeks of the year?  How do you use learning games in you classroom?  How do you keep students accountable for information learned through game play?  I'd love to hear from you!

T.E.E.R.

No, dear reader, I did not misspell the title of my post.  T.E.E.R. is an acronym to help my students reach new heights in answering open response questions about the main idea in non-fiction.
It all started with the book Close Reading of Informational Text by Sunday Cummins.

 

In this book Cummins gives a lot of great lessons for teaching students how to find the main idea in non-fiction.  She like to emphasize the strategy of synthesis, which she teaches by using a framed photograph.  Showing the students a framed photo she asks:  Of all the photos I own, why did I decide to frame this one?  Students start with the details in the picture and then use synthesis to help them understand the significance of these details.  This leads to why the picture was framed.

As I was reading this book, I did some synthesis of my own.  We have been learning about non-fiction text structures for the past two months.  I realized that knowing the text structure gives us a huge clue as to the main idea.  By adding the strategy of synthesis, we can understand the significance of the details in the text.  And, finally, we can show off all these strategies by using T.E.E.R.:

T = TTQA (turn the question around)

E = evidence from the text

E = explain why this evidence is significant

R = restate the TTQA

 I combined all of this information on a poster for my students showing how we start with a "mission", then use the text and a strategy to create a well-written open response.  Although I have talked about all these things before, I have never combined them with this kind of explicit teaching before.  The initial results have been outstanding!

What kind of skills can YOU combine together?

To conclude, no post would be great without a FREEBIE.  I created this worksheet to help my advanced students improve their sentence fluency.  I listed eight words that begin complex sentences.  These are words like although, after, if, since, and because.  Students fill in the rest of the sentence after the complex modifier.

 

Seymour Simon: One Book- Many Uses

One Book: Many Uses

 Wildfires by Seymour Simon

     Seymour Simon's books are great to use in the classroom.  Simon has written hundreds of books on a variety of non-fiction subjects.  His pictures are engaging, and he writes without using typical non-fiction features.  This type of non-fiction writing mirrors what my fourth graders are expected to read and understand during their high-stakes state testing.  Because of this, I decided to use this book with both my entire class and two of my small groups.  By using the same text in small group, I save time by skipping the actual reading of the text.  I also find it easier to elicit critical thinking when using a familiar text.

     First, let me explain a little about how I use small groups.  For my reading structure, I use The Daily Literacy CAFE which is a combination of Gail Boushey and Joan Moser's Daily Five (which is what the children do independently) and CAFE (their assessment to instruction model for teacher-directed lessons and small group work).  All of my groups are based on skills, not reading level.  Currently, my Monday-Wednesday- Friday group is working on main idea and my Tuesday-Thursday group is working on cause and effect.  

 

     The "Main Idea" group started with taking copies of the text and dividing it into sections, based on the main idea.  In order to show this process clearly, we they literally cut and pasted the text into sections.  Then each section was given a title that reflected the main idea.  There work is in green in the above picture, with key words highlighted and circled.

      The "Cause and Effect" group underlined causes in red and effects in blue. 

Students with Poor Comprehension

Helping Students Who Lack Comprehension During Individual Conferring

It has happened to every intermediate grade teacher.  That dreaded moment when you sit down with one of your little friends... and it's obvious that he/she is not comprehending.  Your heart just sinks.  It is certainly a difficult moment and your response can either turn this student around or lead to years of problems.  But at that moment, all you feel like is a deer in the headlights.  There are so many things you could do, but which is right?
1.  Be honest... and proactive.  Say, "It looks like you are missing a lot of the important information in this book. Let's see if we can figure out what the problem is.  Are you willing to help me out or should be put aside this book for a later time?"  I know this sounds heartless, but we just can't have kids continue to read a book they are not comprehending- no matter how popular it is, no matter how much they want to read it.  The child needs to know that, if you can't figure out what the problem is and fix it together, reading this book is just not an option right now.
2.  Check the books reading level against the child's.  If the level is too high for the child, be brave and tell them they can't read it...YET.  Go over to the bin that had the book and help them find a lower level alternative.  This is why it is best to arrange your classroom library thematically, rather than by level.  I put the child's independent level on the top of my conferring page so I always know it.
3.  If the level is right, do a 1 minute fluency check.  Have the child start at the top of the page and read for one minute.  While they are reading, listen for their prosody (expression and use of punctuation).  After they are done, count the words.  I keep a piece of paper in my pensieve with all of the wpm goals for different reading levels.  If they read too slowly or with lack of prosody, go back to step 2.
4.  If the level and fluency are OK, back up and reread.  Find the part of the book where the child had good comprehension.  Mark it with a stickee.  Have the child read from there.  Make sure they commit to reading differently the second time, otherwise they will get the same result.  This means they have to verbalize a strategy.  Model if they need encouragement and write it on the stickee.  Here's the important part:  Check back with them at the end of the time period to see if comprehension has improved AND...
5.  Have the child put a second stickee when they finished and hand it to you.  Congratulations, teacher!  You now have homework.  Your homework is to figure out why this child is loosing comprehension.  Read the story (preferably from the beginning) with a critical eye and see if you can come up with one strategy the child can do to improve their comprehension.  At this point, the strategy will probably need to involve writing something down since just thinking wasn't enough. With one child, I found that the book had six completely different main characters.  I had to write them down, along with a little blurb, to remember them all!  I suggested she do the same. Once she did, she came to the conclusion on her own that the book was too hard.  Another little friend of mine was having a hard time with a historical fiction book set at the time of the Revolutionary War.  I realized he needed a better understanding of this time period to understand the events of the book.  I suggested he take a break from the book and read "If You Lived During the Revolutionary War". He did and, when he went back to the book, he found his comprehension much improved.
6.  Whether you are able to come up with some specific strategy or not, plan on meeting briefly every day with this child until their issues are resolved with this book or they choose a better book.  How do you manage this brief, but intense, support?  Have your regular reading group go to your group spot and read their choice book while they wait for you.  Do a brief check in with your targetted child.  Find out what page they are on and have them summarize the book so far.  Also have them commit to a strategy.  If all seems well, send them off to read.  Run your small group.  Check in with your targetted child once more, either during their reading or at the end of the reading time. Doing this will force them to become a more active reader because you are raising the level of accountability.  With most children, I find three days in a row is enough.  After that, gradually reduce the level of your support.
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First Attempts at a True RtI Model

A few weeks ago, I found this video via Pinterest.

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NsyvFN8kX8&feature=youtu.be

I love how everything in the binder was organized and the strong link between assessment and instruction.  However, the binder was designed for much younger students (K-2) with reading difficulties (phonics, accuracy, fluency) that lend themselves to keeping track of data in this way.  My students are entering fifth grade, and those that I am most worried about have comprehension issues.  Comprehension, as a skill, does not lend itself to numeric data.  As I saw it, there were three barriers to implementing something like this that I needed to overcome:
1) a form to assess and graph progress weekly
2) 20-30 one-page passages, per reading level, to assess comprehension each week for twenty to thirty weeks
3) a quick, consistent, easy-to-administer comprehension check that can be converted into a number to be graphed 
4) multiple ways to teach comprehension skills
I think I have finally created this and I share my first attempt here.  Feedback welcome!
Intervention Tracking Sheet
My intervention tracking sheet is a bit more generic and doesn't contain the "digging deeper" assessments that are part of the video, since I don't have them.  I will make do with all the other data I have, which is recorded in other places.  There is a nice big space to graph weekly assessments.  Here is the link to the document in Google docs:

https://sites.google.com/a/sau61.org/mrsjones/Reading%20Progress%20Monitoring%204%20BLOG.docx?attredirects=0&d=1

"Dedicated" Passages to Assess Comprehension
I purchased Daily Reading Warm-Ups from Teacher Created Resources with 150 passages each.  I purchased a third grade, fourth grade, and fifth grade version.  Expensive?  Yes, but it is worth the price to not have to create passages from scratch.  I can just hand them the book- no photocopying needed.  These book will NOT be used for instruction, only assessment.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1420634917/ref=oh_details_o00_s00_i02

Numeric Value for Comprehension Check
I decided to use retells as my comprehension check.  They are consistent and easy to administer.  I created a form that assigns a numeric value for each element of a retell and put this in a chart form.  It is available on Teachers Pay Teachers via this link:

http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Scoring-a-Retelling

Multiple Ways to Teach Comprehension
For a long time I have been influenced by the work of Judith Irwin in reading comprehension.  I will be using her "seven dimensions" of comprehension to guide my instruction.

http://www.amazon.com/Promoting-Active-Reading-Comprehension-Strategies/dp/0137312415/ref=cm_cr-mr-title

My plan is to teach strategies for one "dimension" at a time using Irwin's resource book, assessing the results in overall comprehension weekly. If a student does not make progress for two weeks in a row, I will switch to a different "dimension" and set of strategies.  So it should take a maximum of 14 weeks (or about one trimester) to be able to find the dimension that the child is having difficulty with.
For more information about data-based decision making, read the article:  "Tier III Assessments, Data-Based Decision-Making, and Interventions" by Kristin Powers and Arpita Madal from California State University, Long Beach.

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This school year isn't over, but I'm already thinking of next year.  In looking at the individual reading inventories of my students, I know that comprehension will be the main focus of my instruction.  Because of that, I want to revise The CAFE Menu that I have been using as my instructional "road map".  For those of you that aren't familiar with CAFE, it is the instructional plan of Gail Boushey and Joan Moser (known as "The Sisters") outlined in their book:  The CAFE Book. CAFE is an acronym to help students categorize and remember strategies for:  Comprehension, Accuracy, Fluency, and Expanding Vocabulary.
I have already revised their CAFE Menu once before to pare down the accuracy and fluency strategies for my intermediate students.  Now I want to entire menu to be comprehension for my looping class of fifth graders.  My new CAFE acronym is:
Critical and Creative Thinking:  I am an active, engaged reader.
Author's Purpose:  I know the message the author is sending.
Facts/Details:  I remember the facts/details the author tells me.
Expand Vocabulary:  I can use interesting words the author uses.

https://sites.google.com/a/sau61.org/mrsjones/Advanced%20CAFE%20Menu.docx?attredirects=0&d=1