Guided Reading and Center Activities

Hi Y'all! Hope you're having a wonderful October. I can't believe our first 9 weeks are already over. Boy is time flying. My kiddos are moving right along and I greatly attribute that to what's happening during our reading block. To start, the curriculum we use for whole group is the BEST. If you haven't heard of DSC or Making Meaning I highly suggest you check it out and beg your administrator to use it! It does such a good job of having the students lead the discussions, analyze and interpret awesome texts, interact with each other through partner and group discussions, use higher order thinking, and problem solving. Can I just reemphasize that it uses real children's literature like Chrystanthemum by Kevin Henkes, Peter's Chair by Ezra Jack Keats, and It's Mine by Leo Lionni to name a few. Such a nice change and it makes the kids truly love reading and listening to stories.

Other than that I have been using a few different intervention systems for my guided reading instruction such as LLI (Fountas and Pinell), and the school wide Intervention system for phonics (also DSC) SIPPS. Our interventions require all of our students to read daily, practice sight words, phonics, and writing. I love that it incorporates writing even for my students reading at a Level A or 1. It's a great opportunity to have structured writing time where I can monitor their writing in small groups. 

Enough with the programs we use, the real reasons I wanted to write this post it to show you the additional support I am using with my children in centers. It's so important but challenging to find activities that can be differentiated easily for each group, done independently, are rigorous, and engaging enough for the children to actually enjoy and learn. I definitely don't have my centers perfected, but each year they are greatly improving and I think I found a system that I really like. It allows me to differentiate and it ties in perfectly with my Differentiated Spelling Instruction for the year! (I'll write more about that later)

I rotate my center activities frequently and have been trying a new system so I can differentiate their centers to meet their current needs and abilities. Every day they do guided reading with me and sight word activities (which can be seen and purchased here).  Three or four out of the 5 days they do a word work activity (can be purchased by clicking the picture above). On a word work "off day"they have the option of listening center, media center check out, writing center, computers/iPad, or reading in our class library. These get rotated out so they it's not repetitive.

I chose 3 - 4 "word work"centers and put them in a colored envelope to match their center's groups. Each group will do all of the word work activities throughout the week, but only one group does that specific word work activity a day. This allows me to use different spelling patterns/words that match their current abilities. For example, next week we're doing a picture/word sort for short vowels, beginning sounds, and matching capital letters to lower case letters. This way ALL of my students do a "picture/word sort activity"but it meets their needs instead of being 1 activity across the board.





Each group has a "black holder" that keeps their center's work folders, word work holder, and reader's response journals. They keep these at their group tables to minimize movement throughout the class during center time.





One thing I love about the word work centers other than the differentiation it allows, is that all of the activities are super interactive. My kids LOVE making their spelling words into necklaces, and building words with tiles or by rolling a dice.

Their reader's response journals directly correlate to a book we read during making meaning, our vocabulary instruction, or a book they read in IDR (Independent Reading). I emphasize using the text to support their answers and love their responses! I would say they are 95% independent in this center, but working in groups greatly eliminates teacher interventions.

One activity they can do in writing center is the "Sticker Story". They choose 3 stickers and create a story from that. I also allow them to write letter, send "post cards, free write or practice handwriting.

Listening center is pretty relaxed, I used to require a response sheet but I feel like I really just want my children's focus to be on enjoying the story and hearing a fluent reader, so I allow them to listen to more than one book instead of focusing on their response sheet.

Computers/iPad there are obviously a zillion website resources. My kids use bookflix.com or MyOn.com (a reading intervention program). My main focus is having them interact with engaging text, and listen to fluent readers.  Sometimes I will let them get on other reading websites, but it's not my preference because a lot of time they get on things that aren't focused on the skills they need to practice, it's just songs or games they know and like.

 

I hope this helps give you some new ideas for your literacy center/reading block! I love the way it's going so far this year. If you have any questions please post below!

Super Science (Plants, Sun, and More!)

So I've been terrible. Really, really terrible at getting my posts up! I can't believe how swamped I feel now that school is in full swing. So please forgive me for my back to back posts. I have lots of time to make up for.

We've been SUPER busy this year with Science (my favorite)! We started our year off learning about who a scientist is and what they do. We had some Steve Spangler fun then moved on over to gardening (my other favorite)! We started by learning about living and non-living things, then did some plant exploration with BrainpopJr.

We read (and sang) Are You Living and did some Living/Non Living activities in our science notebooks.

The next week we planted our seeds. We discussed what a plant needs in order to grow and live, talked about nutrients and soil requirements, and the proper spacing needed for plants to grow. We planted carrots, onions, broccoli, okra, and heirloom purple green beans. We logged our observations in a plant growth journal and will record our observations of it's growth for a whole month.

We read From Seed by to Plant by Gail Gibbons to help us gather a lot of information for our science journal activities. The kids LOVED seeing the plants grow just like the book showed, they even use the vocabulary like sprout, bulb, and blossom.

We talked about the parts of the plants and made a fun diagram which looks so cute hanging up in the class!

I plan on doing some recipes with my kids after our food comes in. I think this part is often missed when growing plants and vegetables with children and is such a key piece to the learning process. This summer I made a few recipes with my summer school kids.

I think it is so important to teach our children how to not only grow their food, but be an active part in what they make, and eat. Most of my kids had never eaten half of the vegetables I cooked/made but they said they would try it because they made it! It also got them eating healthy and being conscious of what goes into their bodies.

As I made the food, the kids recorded the process and ingredients and brought the recipe home to their parents. I promoted them making it at home with their family, although I'm not sure if any of them actually did or not.

Now we've moved on to learning about space, stars and the sun. We started by reading a book about the stars in the sky and discussed how there are BILLIONS of stars in the sky much bigger then our sun and how the small stars we see in the sky are only just a few of the really enormous stars we can even see. I was shocked at how easily my children picked up this concept. We then created our own night sky on black paper and tried to demonstrate how there are millions of stars so many we could never imagine seeing them. Some did better then others, but hey - they look great.

Next we learned about the sun and it's properties of heat energy and light energy. We watched a Brainpop Jr video then wrote down the facts about the sun we learned from a book and the video. They gave me some great facts to record. I wanted to demonstrate the heat energy the sun gives off (even when we can't see it), by using solar paper. They chose an item (some indoor items and some from outside), placed it on top of the paper for 10 minutes in the sun, then we took it inside and rinsed them and voila! Some came out really distinctly and others not some much. But they loved the experiment regardless!

We're going to do some smores cooking in a solar oven next week too. The weather has been absolutely crazy today, and it has literally down poured on and off every day for two weeks. So we're waiting for all this rain to go away - I mean really, we are the sunshine state…this is getting ridiculous.

After this we're going to dive into the topic of gravity, and how our orbit around the sun causes everything from seasons, to day and and night. This will transition us right into gravity and forces and motion. I absolutely love science and can't wait to share more with you! Hope this was helpful! :)

Math Block

Hey there everyone! October is turning up to be a CRAZY busy month. We have report cards, our first field trip, lesson study, and a Being a Writer lesson study workshop (more to come on the Being a Writer series later). Today was picture day and my kids looked so darn precious! Oh I forgot to mention our Booktacular curriculum night toward the end of the month and that um, "wonderful" school holiday Halloween (aka crazy day).

I wanted to show you guys my math block this year because it's totally different from anything I had done or seen before. In the past I always taught math whole group, and I don't know about you but it was exhausting. My kids who typically struggled in math would lose focus easily or get frustrated, while my higher students would get bored and finish too quickly. I would constantly be battling trying to keep each child in the right spot and help everyone. I was definitely NOT meeting the needs of all of my kids. 

This year, our wonderful math coach gave me the suggestion of teaching my "core lesson" in small groups while the others were doing centers that related to the topic we were learning. This way I could really differentiate my students learning and base the skill we are targeting to meet their current mathematical capabilities and understandings. I couldn't be happier with the system! I feel like each of my children are REALLY getting what they need and are making great strides in math so far (especially my TIER II/TIER III children). 

So here's how it goes: We start off in whole group doing calendar math which consists of a number of things; day and month review, place value, 120's chart, and using coins to count the day. They also identify even/odd, 3 more 3 less, and use a 20's frame to identify the day. This is all done on the promethean board which I also love. It's a great way to interact with technology instead of the basic wall calendar.

After that I typically switch right into centers. SOMETIMES I will do a quick 3 -5 minute mini lesson if I feel my "higher group" would benefit from it in order to be successful in their independent station but typically I do without.

Theres 4 groups (each center is 15 minutes each):

• Independent Station (typically a worksheet associated with the lesson for the day)
• Guided Math (with me)
• Computers (we use JiJi which is the ST Math intervention system - p.s. IT'S AMAZING)
• Math journals (sometimes substitute STEM or a math game)

If the students finish early - which they almost ALWAYS do for journals and the independent worksheet they play a game practicing the skill we just learned or are learning now, so I always have at least two games prepared.

I have my highest children in math start at the independent station, my 2nd highest group at computers, 3rd highest group at math journals, then my lowest group always starts with me.

After each child comes to my station, they then finish the independent portion of worksheet we did at guided math, or do a different work sheet that is targeted for their current skill/learning goal (i.e. my lowest TIER students get a work on something they can actually be successful at…). It's also been really fun actually being able to enrich my highest students and really challenge them. Some of the activities or games we've played I've been shocked they were able to do. Had I kept my whole group rotation I would have never been able to extend their learning that much.

I also want to mention, I LOVE using math journals. As you can see (the left side) there answers are not always correct, but it's super interesting to see how they try to solve things. One of my goals for this year is to help my students revise and reflect on their learning, and I think using the journals would be a great tool. Once I work the kinks out I'll definitely write a post on it! I'm trying to make them more interactive instead of just word problem each day, so I'm going to have them using counters, dice, and gluing/using 10's frames to help support their answers soon. I also have them do games and record their thinking in their journals sometimes.