Responding to Reading: 3 Ways to See Improvements Instantly!

Hey hey hey! It's Kelli from Tales of a Tenacious Teacher! I'm sitting here enjoying my Spring Break. If you are too- congrats! You've made it this far! If yours has already past or still coming... hang in there and keep working it! You've got this! 

I'm here to share 3 ways to improve your students' responses to their reading. As I tell my students, we respond to our reading for a few reasons. 1) I'm not in their brains! I don't know what they are thinking, what's easy for them, what's hard... so we need to take time to respond to our reading. We respond to our reading both with the speaking and the writing domain so both are included here today. 2) As we learn to become better readers, we need to stop and check our thinking often. I always tell them that they won't do this for the rest of their reading lives the way we do it right now in 3rd grade... but the things we practice now will help it become automatic for us later so we spend time writing and sharing about our thinking often to help it become automatic. 

Usually with that, I have them buy into the importance as to why we do this. It's also a good talking piece with parents who sometimes think that because their child can read fast and accurately, they don't always fully comprehend their reading. So how do I get students to think deeply and completely about their reading? I've got 3 tips!

If you've been around here for a little while, you'll know that I love rubrics and language. Both are in this post. I'm guilty though of not always using rubrics to help both me and my students know what to expect. I've found that a simple rubric for each skill/focus is easiest for me to see what students know what to do and what they are missing to get to the next step.

These rubrics are based off of specific skills and focuses. The top is a 3-point rubric that focuses on 2 things: the reading focus and the language focus. The reading focus targets "how" the student is able to respond to their reading on a particular focus (such as character motivation). The language focus is usually a grammar focus to help them  communicate their idea more clearly. The bottom rubric targets "what" their work tells you as a teacher on their thinking level when it comes to that focus. 

Two ways to use this: 

1. Cut them in half and just give students the top half. Have them glue it into their reading notebooks to reference so when they are completing a jotting on that focus, they now what you are expecting. You can keep the bottom half as a talking point if you need to pull a strategy group. 
2. Have them glue the whole page into their notebook so that students know clearly what to work towards and what their work tells you of their thinking while reading.

I'm a big proponent of graphic organizers. I've found the most success when I give a graphic organizer and have students fill it out. Later, students draw it themselves and modify to make it work for them. I've given my students a blank page in their reading notebooks and have told them to just jot during their reading... all I get usually is a mess of thoughts and I struggle to identify what my students are even thinking during their reading. So graphic organizers help both my students think completely and help me notice what they rock at and where they have some gaps for me to help fill.

For our character units (we have a series unit, mystery unit, and biography unit that we can use all these organizers for), we pay attention to our characters... a lot. We think about their problem, but not just their problem- we think about how they react to it and what that tells us about them. We think about their actions and choices and how they impact relationships and problems. We think about character motivations and what is pushing them to do things. All of this helps us develop strong ideas and traits for our characters. I've found simple box graphic organizers with question prompts to be very helpful to get students to think deeper.

The last tip to is help them communicate their thinking clearly through language. This is a great time and way to integrate grammar into meaningful instruction. I've made little mini-charts that students glue right into their notebook to reference often. Even better, if you change the printing settings and scale down a bit, they fit perfectly into a composition notebook. These mini-charts are meant to provide language supports and expand vocabulary to help students get to a deeper level. I've used an adjective chart to help students recommend books, adverbs to describe how their character reacts to something to give a better picture of their characters intent, question matrixes to help them formulate stronger questions, and sentence frames to initiate conversations about books in book clubs. 

 

Sometimes I add the language cues right to my graphic organizers to help it become even more accessible. 

I've found that by implementing these 3 tips, my students are producing more quality work and it allows me to see where I need to put my efforts. 

Want to give it a try? Click on the image below try using it. If you find it helpful, you can check out the whole set of rubrics, graphic organizers, and mini-charts in my TpT store!

Creating a Classroom Congress

I always said that I thought teaching social studies would be fun. Due to how our schedule was, I haven't been able to teach it for the last 3 years. Each person on my team was assigned a speciality content area (Science, Art, Social Studies, or Health- or what we call SASH time) and we taught the whole grade that content through a rotation. This school year though, things changed and now I was going to teach all the content areas just to my class alone. Yes, it was going to be a lot more work for me, but I was so excited to change things up! And social studies has been one of my favorite SASH content areas to teach!

This past rotation was all about the United States Government. We did a lot of background learning about what government is, why we have it, and how it is structured. We watched a lot of short videos I found on-line and used our text book to learn some vocabulary. After we learned about the U.S. Constitution and the 3 Branches of Government, we began to talk about how a bill becomes a law.

If you want more information how I taught this first part described above (which I found to be super helpful to prepare us for this next part), head over to my personal blog, Tales of a Tenacious Teacher, to find the resources I used and created. But this post is going to explain how we created our own Classroom Congress to really make our learning come alive!

Step 1: Discussing the Process

We first learned how a bill became a law by watching the School of Rock video. Then, students worked together to fill in the blanks to this mini-poster I made. We discussed how the process is long and not ever bill even gets that far in the process. Of course I left out some parts for the sake of not overwhelming my 8 and 9 year olds. But once they knew the general process, it was time to apply it!

Step 2: Creating Your Constitution

The next day, we created the preamble to our own classroom constitution. We brainstormed different adjectives we wanted to use to describe our classroom. We voted, and you can see the word they chose. This was actually a very important step that I'll explain next.

We just did this on our SMARTboard- hence the messy writing.

Step 3: Writing Our Own Bills

After we had our constitution, it was time to start the bill and law creating process! I had students write bills that would help us reach this goal in our preamble. This limited students from getting too silly (as many said we should play games all day long or eat ice cream at every meal). We kept going back to, "Will this law help us form a more intelligent classroom?"

Step 4: Congress Positions

Students got to write 2 different bills. I collected them then for the next day. We turned our room into the Capitol building with the Senate on one side and the House of Representatives on the other. Surprisingly, making our desks into circles was the most challenge part of this day! Then students had to figure out which part of Congress they would be serving. I had these little slips printed and students just picked one out of a bucket. It was an easy way to sort them out into the houses. One senator slip said "Vice President" and one representative slip said "Speaker of the House." These would be the leaders of each group. There roles included:

• Reading the bill to their group
• Calling on people to share if more than one person was talking at once
• Getting "order" by knocking 3 times on their desk to quiet their group
• Completing the voting process
• Circling on the bill if it passed their house

Once they were in their groups, it was time for the debating! I gave each side of Congress one bill each. They were to discuss if they think this bill should be turned into a law for our classroom. They had to defend their reasons and listen to one another, not to mention make sure it would follow our preamble of our Constitution. This was great to practice our accountable talk!

To protect my kiddos, I covered up their faces with adorable Melonheadz Clipart :)

After some back and forth, the leader of each group would ask for a vote. They would say, "All in favor" and if people agreed, they would raise their hand. If more people had their hand up than down, it would pass and go onto the other house. If more people had their hands down than up, it would be eliminated. 

To protect my kiddos, I covered up their faces with adorable Melonheadz Clipart :)

Step 5: Debating and Voting Time

The first round, both houses did not pass the bill. So I gave each one another bill for them to repeat the process. They were going CRAZY! But in a good way! They were so engaged and passionate! I simply stood back and listened to the conversations- they were running the show all on their own. This time, both bills passed the house they were introduced in. The House of Representatives even changed one slightly before passing it on. We switched bills then to see if it could pass in the other house and sure enough- both did. They were so proud and realized that they had to work together not just with their own house but by thinking of the other house and what they might be thinking. And they kept our goal in mind the whole time. Perhaps I should invite real members of Congress into our classroom to see how it is done ;).

They begged for us to do it more, so we left our desks like this over the weekend and will resume our session on Tuesday. I'll be either signing these into laws or vetoing them on Wednesday before we wrap up this unit and move onto our next content area.

Do you teach government? How do you help students apply this tricky concept?

Reestablishing Routines Without Boring Your Students [Freebie]

background image credit to: Worth a Thousand Words

Happy New Year iTeach Third Readers! There's nothing better than coming off of a long break and feeling rejuvenated and refreshed! I hope you all had some time to take care of yourselves and enjoy some well-deserved time off!


But with our nice long break comes getting back into a much needed routine. Our students have been away from our normal day-to-day for some time now, and it's important that we reestablish our routines that make our classroom run efficiently! A common mantra in our school is, "Go slow to go fast." We might not jump right back into heavy content on day 1 of returning from break, because we know that if we take the time to reestablish our classroom and revisit our hopes and dreams, that we will be able to obtain more later in the year. I'm not sure about your district and pacing, but our second half of the year is often filled with brand new content that our kiddos haven't really been exposed to yet. I'm talking multiplication, fractions, and we can't forget the state tests. We've got to have our classroom running smoothly in order for us to fully devote our focus to these concepts.

But I also know, that when students come back from this break, they know how our classroom works already... they just need a little fine tuning. So I'm here to share a few different ways to get your students involved in reestablishing routines that can be done in fun, engaging ways!

I like to have students move and mingle when possible. I myself am a busy body, so to sit still for a long period of time just doesn't cut it! This activity is a great way to get students to both move and mingle while reviewing little tid-bits that they might have forgotten. 

This works best for things that have 1 answer. I like it to review lots of random little things such as pencil etiquette, parts to a routine, etc. The object is to find somebody who knows the answer to a certain statement. Some of my specific examples include:

Find somebody who...

• knows how many books we take home in our baggie
• knows the 5 parts to our 5-star greeting
• knows where sharp and dull "lost" pencils go
• knows what to bring to _______ time

If they ask someone and that person can give the answer, they then write their classmate's name in the box and go on to a new one. Here's mine that I'll be using this year in full.

You can either take mine as is (although it is pretty specific to my room) or use it as inspiration to do you own. I included mine as an example as well as an editable version so that you can type in things that you want your students to review in a fun way.  Click the appropriate link below.

Side note: the editable version may look a little fuzzy on your computer screen, but it should print clearly.

We follow the Reader's and Writer's Workshop model and there are many different components that go with it. Instead of us doing a whole group review over each of them, I like to first see what they remember about our expectations. I've done this in the past (and you can read about them here) where I put Y-charts with different focuses around the room. If you are not familiar with the Y-chart, it asks students to think about how something looks like, sounds like, and feels like. 

Students move around the room, write an idea on the different posters on how an aspect of our work shop looks like, sounds like, or feels like. I try to emphasize for them to write down what they SHOULD do as opposed to what they SHOULDN'T do. For example, instead of having students say, "Don't talk." I try to have students say, "Have a zero voice." We like to reinforce the correct behavior, so I often try to have students rephrase if they give the negative by simply saying, "If we aren't going to talk, what will we do?"

After students have time to go around, add their ideas, and read others, I give one Y-chart to each table group. They read all the responses, discuss, and highlight the 3 "most important" things to remember. Then, they report back to the rest of the class. By doing this graffiti activity, the students are in charge for the vast majority of it and are engaged throughout the reviewing process. They get to move, chat, and respond in a meaningful way. 

If you want to use any of these Y-charts for your classroom, you can grab my examples below.

I hope the first weeks back for you are smooth and that you can find time to enjoy your students while slowly getting them back into the swing of things!

Engage your Independent Readers in 5 Minutes or Less

Hey! It's Kelli again from Tales of a Tenacious Teacher. Hopefully by this time of the school year, you are in your flow and routines. But even some well-oiled machines need a little extra maintenance to keep it running smoothly. What machine am I referring to in the classroom?

Independent Reading time of course!

I know my students' independent and instructional reading levels, they are in just right books, I've shaved my mini-lessons down so that students are getting a solid chunk of reading time, my small groups are up and going (for the most part), so what could go wrong...

Oh ya, their stamina.

When I am in group mode, I am depending on my students who are not meeting with me to be engaged in their reading. Sometimes they need a little extra push and support. Here are 3 ways to help students get and stay engaged in their books! And even better, they take me less than 5 minutes to do!

When I notice students are not engaged, my first step is trying to figure out why! Is it a book choice issue?  Is it distractions? So I first just watch students and take some quick notes and then pull them little nuggets into a group. Thanks to the amazing J. Serravallo's Reading Strategy Book, I could easily do a few different strategy groups based on why students weren't engaged. And the best part- each group only took about 5 minutes from start to finish! Differentiated, short, practical... what more could a teacher ask for! And no, I'm not being paid to say any of this. The book is just that good! I've used it countless times this year, with a lot of times around engagement checks for my kiddos.

Funny story behind this one. I noticed while I was working with a group one day that my group of independent workers was getting restless. I was getting agitated thinking, "We are in November... this shouldn't be happening! They need a good lecture." Put the brakes on right there! That ain't gonna motivate them.

I looked around my room for something... anything... to use. And I saw my little spikey green grass things from Michael's and an index card on my desk and BOOM! The Focused Reader of the Day award was born! You can tell it was on a whim because of my messy handwriting on a neon orange index card, but hey... it works! I simply told students at the end of reading time that I noticed a student in particular that was so focused nearly the entire time. We did a drum roll, I announced the student's name, we clapped, and that student got to have the "trophy" on their desk until the end of reading time the next day when we would pass it to someone else. On the back of the card, I started to write down the date and student who earned it as a way to document who has received it.

Needless to say, it's working like a charm.

Lastly, having students jot during their reading is a great way for them to show how engaged they are with the text. Not to mention, it gives students a break to stop reading for a moment if they are still building their stamina in a productive way. However, sometimes they don't know what to write or they get tripped up on spelling which then leads them down a path of pencil tapping and wasted reading time. That is where our language charts come into play. Throughout the unit, we add vocabulary words (word choice) and thinking stems (language of thinking) to the easel. We don't use anything fancy... just post-its. Since we build it as we come to the skills, students know exactly where to look for help.

If they want to make an inference... there are post-its for that. Cause and effect... post-its for that too. Any type of thinking can be documented and supported up here on the language chart. Just think: How do I want my students to communicate that kind of thought? BAM- you have your thinking stems.

To help with spelling some other words, we have the word choice section. We also discussed the meaning of these words.  It takes only a few seconds during a lesson to stop and write a word or sentence stem on a post-it and stick it on our easel, but students use it constantly.

What do you do to help students stay engaged during independent reading time?

Get Your Students to Talk Non-Stop (The Good Way)

Some teachers prefer a quite room where students are independently working on completing a task. Not me! I love the buzzing sound of students working together and teaching one another. I find sometimes, they even do a better job at teaching one another than me standing up there! Which is why it is so important that I build talking skills into our daily work. Just like with anything, we must explicitly teach, model, and give feedback on conversational skills. I'm sharing a few things I've done in my room to help this year.

Conversational Moves

First, we need to discuss what it means to have a conversation and more importantly, how do we make it MOVE! We created this chart together. I prepared it before hand and left spaces for us to fill in. You can tell because my handwriting got all messy #teachertruth.

Give 'Em Supports

Later, we talked about the different types of way we can participate in a conversation. I made a handy hand-out that students glued into their notebooks. I however can NOT find the one that I made at school, so I retyped it up to share with you all! Click on the picture to download your own version!

We talked about 4 ways (there are more, but we are starting with these four) we can participate:

If you are looking for a more permanent display, I have sentence stems in my store for purchase here. I found that having a student copy easily at their finger tips is great for book clubs and partnership talks.

Here's the best part about this work: you can use it during ANY content! This is something you can always work into your daily work. Give your students the opportunity to have meaningful conversation and the supports and you will see their engagement and understanding of the topic just blossom!

How do you help students share their ideas with each other?

Being Responsive with Anecdotal Note Taking

Hey, hey, hey! It's Kelli from Tales of a Tenacious Teacher! I don't know about you, but I'm nose deep in all the new school year stuff I've barely found time to eat and sleep! One of my main focuses at the beginning of the year is to try to learn as much about my new group as possible. I'm trying to learn about their individual interests, families, strengths, areas of growth...... I could go on and on. How do I keep it all straight???

Anecdotal notes are a huge part of my formative assessments all year round. What are they exactly? It's a super fancy word for writing down your observations. Observations can tell you A LOT about your students for both academics and behavior. Don't believe me? Here are few reasons why I use anecdotal note-taking in my classroom:

• They help me track things in a variety of subjects including behaviors
• They help me be responsive to my students' needs
• They help me to notice patterns for a particular student or groups of students
• They provide explicit examples for discussions with my team, service members, and families
• They help teachers stay on top of each student and not just those who are struggling for the feedback that all students (and families) crave.

What's even more awesome about this formative assessment technique is how versatile it is! You can truly test out many different ways and use what works best for you. I for one have tried many different strategies to house my notes: binders, notebooks, post-its, labels... you name it. After 4 years, I finally found my "go-to" ways of collecting these notes. Here's a few different ways I collect this important data:

Paper & Pencil Strategy
Note-Taking Boxes

I give each of my students a number. That is one reason why I like this strategy and anecdotal note taking in general. Instead of trying to write down a student's name, I can just quickly jot their number down. It saves precious time.

How it works:
I write my focus at the top (an example template is in the cover photo). It might be an engagement inventory during reading, problems they got wrong on a math assessment, or participation during a group discussion. Then, I create a little "code" at the bottom. Usually it consists of symbols that are easy for me to jot quick and that might be repeated for more than one student. As I interact with students or scan the room, I jot down a quick note or symbol inside the student's box. This allows me to see who I have missed and lets me see everyone at a glance all at once. If I'm not writing a ton of information, this is definitely one of my favorite routes to go. I simply keep a clipboard with a bunch of these blank note taking boxes on hand so I can grab it at  moments notice and grab some information. And since I keep it all in one place on the clip board, I know where to find them for when I need them!

Apps and Technology Strategy
   Google Docs

What's cool about the note-taking boxes is I can take it digital too! I also have a blank Google Doc with the note-taking boxes and use my iPad to gather some data. I use the emoji keyboard for my symbols and since it saves my most used one, they are easy to find and tap and use for my students. I go digital with my note-taking boxes if I need to access them from multiples and don't want to bring my clip board or if I want to share them with my team, co-teacher, or service provides because it's easy to do so without loosing my original copy or having to make a paper copy. I still label them at the top (2) and just make a copy to start a new one. I add my key (2) at the bottom as a reference.

Evernote

Another app I found last year that I liked for anecdotal notes is the app Evernote. Here I can take notes based on subject. So I have my reading "notebook," writing "notebook," etc. This way, all my notes are organized by whatever I want to name it (1) in one spot that is easy to find and just like Google Docs, I can share my notes with others (2). I especially like using Evernote if I want to take pictures of student work to keep and show at our PLC or with my co-teacher. I don't love the limited formatting of the app, but I'm finding ways around it (plus I haven't fully dove in and explored it, so I'm sure I'm missing things). Both the app and computer version are helpful to take quick looks (3) of notes before opening them.


I've got my notes, now what?

Once I have my notes I do one of the following:
1. Plan strategy groups

• Is there a group of students who would benefit from some reteaching or the teaching of another strategy? My notes allow me to look for similarities in confusion on topics we are learning about or opportunities for students to have an extension of our learning.

2. Reach out to others for support

• "Hmmm I notice __(insert student name)__ is repeating the same work avoiding behaviors at this specific time. I wonder if my team has any suggestions on how I can help him/her be successful at this time."

3. Reflect on your teaching practices

• "Wow- we really struggle with carrying on a conversation. I'm going to need to help scaffold this work a bit more."

How do you keep track of student performance across the school year or unit? Leave a comment below!