Making Predictions!

Welcome to the first post of Smashing Strategies for Guided Reading, a monthly-link up between 8 teacher bloggers! Each of us will share a guided reading strategy, a teaching tip, and sometimes a freebie! Each month, you’ll have the chance to win a product relevant to each different strategy we blogged about! Time to build up those guided reading resources!  

Making predictions is such a crucial skill for children to learn. What we discover as we grow is life is full of predictions, especially in reading! I am ALWAYS telling my students, "Good Readers Make Predictions!" 

Before heading to the guided reading table, I always start with a quick shared reading lesson. Gather all the students to the floor and do a read aloud in which I model MAKING PREDICTIONS. 

Then we head to our guided reading table... One great book I love to use for teaching this strategy is Tops and Bottoms by Janet Stevens. It's a book about a lazy bear and a tricky hare... full of illustrations and a plot that leads itself to making predictions for beginners!  If you don't have this book or time to go to the library, check out this free read-aloud of Tops and Bottoms on youtube by clicking on the image below!

Meanwhile, meet our friend Paige...Our little helper Predicting Paige makes the road to predicting a LITTLE more tangible for young learners! 

 I briefly introduce Paige as I model making prediction during shared reading but where she really comes alive is at the guided reading table! Each child is given a Predicting Paige trade card that includes her caption, describing what it means to make predictions! Then each child is given a small stack of sticky notes and a pencil. For 2-3 minutes, we discuss how good readers make predictions by looking for clues. We take pictures walks through the book together; we look at the title of the book, and discuss how the back of the book can give us clues before we even start to read! 

Each child is given a leveled guided reading book , according to their Fountas & Pinnell reading level (as you can see from the pictures, each group is reading a different book) and then start recording predictions on each page using their sticky notes. The children are given instructions to make a prediction before they read each page. After the prediction is recorded, they read to find out if it was correct! We talk about how we don't always find the answer to our predictions immediately; sometimes we have to keep reading to find out! I rotate around the table for 10-12 minutes, listening to each child read individually as well as conversing about their predictions. This helps me gauge how each child is coming along with the new strategy. 

As we wrap up, I pass out this Predicting with Paige sheet below, and encourage them to find the two predictions they were MOST PROUD of during their reading. They record the clues they found, the predictions they made and rationale behind it. After that, they record whether or not their prediction was correct! 

*Note after we do this in guided reading for three days, I give this same sheet to my students during their Daily 5 rotations to complete during "read to self" and "listen to reading." This provides accountability in their centers, as well as a quick assessment for me to see how they're working with this strategy on an independent level! 

If you are interested... click on the freebie image to download your own copy of Predicting Paige to use in your classroom! 

If Predicting Paige seems like something of interest to you... enter this giveaway to win the COMPLETE Guided Reading Crew & Their Strategies, Too package! It includes 11 different characters; each character has a specific strategy he/she is associated with! 

*Inferring Izzie

*Connections Carter

*Questioning Quinton

*Schema Sophie

*Background Knowledge Brayden

*Retelling Reagan

*Author's Purpose Ada

*Predicting Paige

*Cause & Effect Chloe

*Summarizing Sebastian

*Visualizing Violet

Your students will fall in love with these silly characters, and hopefully the graphic organizers that go with each will help eliminate prep-time for you guided reading groups! These characters can be used for shared reading, guided reading or independent reading! Print out the trading cards to send home for parents as resources, or leave in your students reading bins! 

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Want to get some more ideas for guided reading? Check out these other blog posts! 

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Thanks for reading... don't forget to come back next month for more guided reading strategies, teaching tips and giveaways!

And the Winners Are...

I just wanted to say THANK YOU to EVERYONE that participated and followed along with my Milestone Celebration Giveaway! I am still in shock of how my little store has grown! 

And now for our WINNERS... Drum-roll please!!!!! 

$100 Amazon Gift Card - Kathleen

$50 TpT Gift Card - Michelle S.

$25 Usborne Books Gift Card - Crystal N.

The Ultimate Guided Reading Bundle - Tamara S

Thanks to everyone who participated, and check back often for more teaching tips, freebies and giveaways! Happy Tuesday! 

Milestone Celebration Giveaway

Hello my friends! So sorry it's been a while... more details to come on that topic later!!

                                  
BIG NEWS! I hit a TpT milestone last month!!! Yahoo! It's been such an incredible journey this past year and a half.  When I began my maternity leave, it was with mixed emotions. I missed teaching so much, my poor husband... there were many tears, but at the same time I wanted to be home with my baby! Teachers Pay Teachers has been able to give me the best of both worlds this past year and a half. For that, I am so grateful!

To celebrate this milestone, I am doing a HUGE giveaway! I will be giving away multiple gift cards as well as my GROWING reading comprehension bundle currently valued at over $116.00!!!  It starts tonight and goes through Sunday Jan 31st! Click on the link below to register!! 

                                    

To add to the fun, I will also be having a week long FLASH FREEBIE of one of my best selling products for the next week as well!!! 

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Thanks so much to my faithful followers and new comers alike! Oh, and good luck! Who doesn't love a free gift card?!?! 

Alphabet Mini Posters Freebie

 Learning the alphabet in kindergarten can sometimes be little tricky! A student of mine knows every letter sound, but when it comes to remembering the letter names... he gets stuck! 

 So I decided to take a different approach. I created alphabet mini posters and printed them out on card stock. We spread them out on the floor and he had to put them in a "train." We would sing the alphabet song each time we went back to the drawing board. 

  

Each mini-poster had a correlating picture to help him if he was stuck on the letter name. 

After he found the correct card, he would put it in our train. We started the activity by having him walk along side each letter, saying (or often singing) them in order as he went. 

We decided to make it even more fun... as he progressed down the alphabet we needed to keep things interesting! He thought it would be clever to hop backwards (so that he could look at the letters straight on) and sing his alphabet song as he went! So cute! 

Little boys are so funny, aren't they? He got a kick out of it.. and guess what? After singing the alphabet song 26 times (or more)... he was doing pretty well with letter name recognition!!

To wrap up, I wanted integrate a little bit of math for him. He's almost mastered counting to 100 and we have been working on using ten-frames to add and subtract! So, we organized the alphabet cards into "tens-frames" and figured out how many letters were in the alphabet. 

We labeled each row, counting by fives. 5, 10, 15, 20, 25... plus one more left over gave us 26! 

If you'd like a free copy of these alphabet mini posters, click on the image at the top to download them! Note: I printed these cards as "booklets" so that they'd print two to a page and come out a little smaller! :) Please use whichever size would be best for your students! Happy teaching!

Literature Circles

This week I had the AWESOME privilege to go into my friend's classroom and get a literature circle started! It was so much fun!! I first began using literature circles when I taught the 5th grade, gifted and talented blend. It was a HUGE change for me, seeing as I had always taught students with disabilities. But of course, it turned out to be awesome. In my 5th grade class, I had a chart created and posted next to our classroom library. My students needing enrichment would be given their role for the week and assigned chapters.

They were expected to complete their reading and their literature circle role BEFORE they came to group. My job was simply to observe discussions, the "discussion director" facilitated conversations! It was INCREDIBLE! Talk about kids taking ownership and responsibility for their own learning... and let me tell you... that was the year of book on tapes for me in the car driving back and forth to work! I had a hard time keeping up with all the different chapter books I had to read before I assigned them!! Ha! Click on the image above for a copy of the literature circle assignments I gave each child to complete before they came to group!

Now, when I moved down to 2nd grade... these assignments were a bit too complex for their little minds! So I modified it! I still had kids that were ready to have additional responsibility for completing reading outside of our guided reading group. But they needed accountability and a challenge to go with it. So I created reader's response questions to several book that kids could read and discuss at their independent reading level. To make things more fun, I even set up a kidblog account and had them blog their responses to each other.. but that's a story for another day!

So this week when I went into my friend's class, I taught the kids how to read the question before they read their chapters in the book. We chose the book Magic Tree House Dinosaurs Before Dark because it's a guided reading Level M (Fountas & Pinnell) and that is the independent reading level for the group. We discussed how good readers are detectives and need to search for the answers to the questions while they read! We also talked about how good readers will also come up with questions of their own to discuss with the group. 

The kiddos set off to read their chapter and record their responses. We gathered at the end, to discuss their answers. The collaboration was AWESOME. Before we discussed as a group, they shared their answers with a partner... using TEXT BASED EVIDENCE to support their thinking! If one partner noticed something the other one hadn't, they just added the details to the response sheet! They were so proud of themselves and I was proud of them too!

Thanks for stopping by! If you are interested in using these Magic Tree House Dinosaurs' Before Dark literature circle questions, click on the picture above!

Meet Frosty the Robot

So often we hear the term 21st century classroom and the importance of preparing children for the 21st century. Laptops, computer, ipads... our district is blessed to have so much but one piece of technology that changed my entire viewpoint as a teacher was a robot.

Meet Frosty, our friendly classroom robot!!!

In my last 1st-2nd grade loop, I had a student with an acute kidney disease. She was in and out of school each fall and once flu season began... forget it. It was too dangerous... one stomach bug would land her in the ICU for days. We set up a plan for a home-tutor to come to her house and do one hour of "tutoring" a day to keep her caught up. The rest of her work was on her own.. but let's be honest. Is a seven year old really self-motivated enough to do a full days work on her own? NO WAY!

So.. in a meeting with our school psychologist, principal, and assistant superintendent, someone suggested we contact our Monroe #1 BOCES technology department and try to utilize the VGO Robot that was being trialed in schools. I couldn't believe it... instead of bringing my student to school, we would bring school to her!

Just before Christmas, we introduced Frosty to the kids. (Note: not a great idea with heightened excitement of Santa and winter break looming for enthusiastic second graders... I would wait for a smoother transition time in the future!) Everyday for our math workshop, our friend would call in on Frosty, the lights would flash and the camera would flip open. She had an ipad at home with an app that would connect to Frosty.  I'd move Frosty with a little remote up to the rug for our mini-lesson before we split off into our math workshop. Frosty would go to each center, including her guided math group with me for small group instruction. She'd have all the resources and materials (that I had previously sent home) to play games at centers with her classmates.

I can not even begin to tell you how many times my eyes would well-up with tears and I would watch this child, who was not able to come to school due to poor health, gleefully interact with her friends across the screen of a robot. In first grade, I had tried to connect her with her peers via Face Time on my iPhone, but it was very difficult with the poor cell connection we had in the classroom. (One time I had my observation while she was Face Timing in for a guided reading group... that was a SIGHT FOR SORE EYES.. but a story for another day! Haha!) It was finally happening, she was loved and included though she could not be there. What a gift.

One would think that 2nd graders would be highly distracted by the use of a LITERAL robot in the classroom... but it amazed me, how quickly it became the norm. When it was time to go to specials, we'd roll Frosty onto the cart, and pull her on down to music or library or whichever special area class we had that day.

If you're interested in hearing more, I have linked the video made by BOCES about our student, VRO Robot named Frosty and how it all worked in our classroom!

Meet Frosty the Robot Video

What about you? Do you have any cool technology that's helping improve the education of your students? Link up your blog posts here!

An InLinkz Link-up

Food Critics

While I am LOVING being on maternity leave for another year... I do miss the classroom! I feel so fortunate to have the opportunity to do some tutoring on the side this year to keep me, "in the loop," so to speak! I am tutoring one kindergartner, a few second graders and a third grader PLUS a doing writing group... which is AWESOME because it's basically a guided writing group for AN HOUR a week! AMAZING! I never had that much time for direct instruction with one group of kids at a time in the classroom!

This week during my writing group, I decided to modify a lesson I used to do in the classroom for descriptive writing. Each child became a food critic in order to emphasize the importance of using JUICY DETAILS in writing. To begin, each child was given a plate of food. (I had previously checked to make sure there were no allergens for students in the group).

Each plate included a few kidney beans, cucumber slices, butterscotch morsels, a frosted animal cookie, shredded cabbage and a few golden graham cereal squares. When I handed them the plates, the kiddos had the most excited and bewildered looks on their faces!

I explained how we were going to be "Food Critics" for the day and our job was to give an opinion , along with three words they would use to describe each food. We reviewed how we can use each of our senses to come up with descriptions of each including what the food looked like, smelled like, tasted like, felt like or sounded like when they bit into it!

Each child did a GREAT JOB coming up with their opinions and then using descriptive language to paint of picture of each food. Words like green, GROSS, slimy, crunchy, sugary and more were used with great expression!

After we finished tasting, I read aloud The Relatives Came by Cynthia Rylant. We looked for ways the author used descriptive language to paint a picture of what the characters were doing and feeling in the story. We also noticed how the pictures supported the descriptive language. The children made many discoveries as we read. It was also a teach-able moment for visualizing and how reading and writing really have many connections!

Finally, to wrap up each child was given a piece of paper with a box to make a sketch. They were given the opportunity to write a personal narrative (something we've been working on) using JUICY DETAILS and descriptive language, just like we used while we were critiquing the food! The kids got really into their writing, and we verbally discussing how they were using "juicy details" to paint a picture in the reader's mind! I was *SO PROUD* of them! :)

Click on the picture below to download the freebie documents I used for my kiddos!

I am also attaching some pictures showing how I implemented this activity in small group stations in my classroom last year. Our foods were mangoes, dill pickles, garbanzo beans, artichokes, lentil chips, and gelato!

I had parent volunteers, including my wonderful mother-in-law come to help facilitate a few of the groups so I could circulate and check-in with each kiddo! You will notice that with a whole group, I had plates and forks for kids to bring with them from station to station. Each food was clearly labeled for the kids to record on their recording sheets, which I did not need to do during my small group tutoring session!

Either way, large group or small group, this activity was a HIT and I HIGHLY recommend it for bringing writing to life for your kiddos!