This spring is presenting new challenges for teachers all across the country. Some of us are getting ready to go back to the classroom for the first time this year. Some of us have been in person all year, but we are about to get new virtual kids. Some of you have been in the ... Read More about Classroom Management and Expectations
Adding some fun games for reading in the classroom schedule will instantly get your kids excited to read! These 5 fun reading games are...
Planning to tutor over the summer? Here are tips for quick and easy planning! Hi there! It's Sarah! I've been tutoring kiddos for the last year and have developed a routine that makes my planning easy and my session flow smoothly. All of the kiddos I tutor are grades K-2 and in need of a boost in their reading skills...fluency, comprehension, and phonics. Warm-up I like to start with some reading that is simple or familiar. I'll either have the kiddo re-read a text from the previous session or read fluency sentences. I have my kiddos keep a composition notebook with past passages to go back and re-read. I use lots of guided reader books to find the just right text for my kiddos to read. These are also great books to leave for kiddos to practice between sessions. Fluency sentence strips from The Moffatt Girls are a GREAT help to boost fluency and confidence! They are also super easy to leave for practice between sessions. Fluency Reading Practice My kiddos have all had good sight word recognition and really need fluency work. I switch between leveled readers and text passages. I usually have kiddos read the text themselves first. After reading, we go back through the text and find words that were tricky and read them. Next, I have the kiddo read through the text with me or by themselves if they are confident. Using a leveled reader Using fluency passages and recording words read per minute (the kiddos love to see their growth!) Find these fluency passages HERE! Using text evidence passages. Grab these passages HERE! Comprehension After some fluency practice with the selected text, I move into comprehension work. In our district, kiddos need to do a written response comprehension question as part of their reading assessment. I have my kiddos practice a written response question with every text and in every session. Comprehension with level reader I use these question stems to develop questions based on the text. Grab the question stems HERE! Completed written response, kiddos write in their composition journal Comprehension with text evidence passages. Grab these passages HERE! Here I use a reading passage with several comprehension tasks for a 2nd grade kiddo. Find these reading passage + comprehension packets HERE! Phonics After the reading and comprehension tasks are complete, I work on some phonics task with my kiddos. One of my favorite tasks is doing a word family word splash. I select a word from our text. I like how this tasks shows kiddos that if they can spell a work like bat, they can also spell cat, mat, sat, etc. Writing short sentences with words from the Word Family Splash Word building and sounding out Extras I like to use phonics poems as an additional fluency tool. The kiddos glue them into their composition notebook so they can go back and re-read between sessions, continuing to build fluency with familiar texts. These phonics poems are from Susan Jones. I use our Literacy Bags in between reading tasks. Literacy Bags break up the rigorous reading and fluency practice we do for much of the session. You can find Literacy Bags HERE! I'm working with a few Kindergartners who need sight word practice. I use the K version of our Differentiated Reading Fluency passages. In K, the passages start as reading letters, then sight words fluently. It perfect support for my K kiddos! You can grab these HERE! Additionally, our Print a Standard packs have been a great support for targeting specific skills students need to work on. Each pack contains tasks for one standard and has several activities for that standard, so there are a lot of opportunities to help the student learn, practice, and master standards based skills. You can grab Print a Standard packs for ELA AND MATH HERE! Connecting with students and parents on a more personal level is the best part of tutoring. I love giving kiddos instant feedback and celebrating their successes! I also love that I can give them more choices to foster a love of reading. In the picture above, I'm showing several text selections. The kiddos I'm working with is able to choose the book he'll read with me for the session. I also love being able to help parents foster learning at home. I've found most all of my parents did not really know about their kiddo's reading level or reading abilities. This makes it difficult for parents to find the best "just right" books for reading at home. After I work with a kiddo, I leave the text piece we worked on for that session (a passage or a book) so the kiddo can re-read it with parents. I leave their composition notebooks with phonics poems for the kiddos to go back a re-read. I also leave the fluency sentence strips for practice between sessions.
Giving students an easy, independent activity to start as soon as they arrive on the first day of school is a great way to calm their nerves. It also allows you to focus on greeting new students and getting supplies organized and put away. Here is a great first day of school printable that students ... Read More about Read & Find – First Day of School Printable
Teaching Habitats to your primary students will be a breeze with my collection of resources to help make your life easier. There's even a freebie!
This Must Do May Do System is the HACK to your rotating reading centers! Have smooth-running groups and effective independent work time.
Worksheets for 1st grade math, first grade math worksheets for free for the basic math topics taught in grade 1.
Upper elementary blog with practical, rigorous, classroom tested ideas to implement with your students.
Help your 1st grader develop of love for reading with these 20+ first grade read aloud chapter books! These stories will help their imagination soar.
When learning how to read, working on FLUENCY and building CONFIDENCE is extremely important! Kids need to know that they CAN read when given the right
ALL ABOUT EARTH Get ready for a month filled with so many fun activities to teach your kiddos all about our planet Earth . I teach this unit in April so it coincides with Earth Day. I’ve loaded up this blog post post with read aloud book ideas, free videos you can share with your students,
Are you looking for engaging grammar centers? These parts of speech activities are perfect. Here are 7 noun centers for teaching grammar.
Are you classroom teacher looking for engaging ways to teach your students to comprehend stories? Read this post for primary ideas on how to get children to learn to visualize and build reading comprehension.
We’re well into week three of our Tomie dePaola author study and knee deep in Strega Nona’s world! My class has fallen in love with the characters in these books. Their folkloric quality, Big Anthony’s bumbling, Bambolona’s brusqueness and Strega Nona’s endearing ways have captured their hearts and their attention. We began this part of […]
It's an interesting worksheet for intermediate students who learn the first and second conditional. They have to read the texts and do the exercises I hope you will enjoy! Have fun! :-) - ESL worksheets
Learn about five different biomes as you color and read key facts about with free printable Biome Coloring Pages for Prek-4th graders.
Learn why and how you should use Readers' Theater in 1st grade to support engagement and reading growth. Make reading fun!
Growth Mindset: The Power of Yet Recently my 1st grade classroom has morphed into a K/1 combination classroom and then resulted in HUGE gaps (academically, socially, & emotionally) between my s…
It's hard to fit it all into your schedule! Here's my 3-step process that makes it easier to create your K-2 structured literacy schedule.
Of the five components of reading, fluency is the one that seems to take a "backseat" most often when teachers have hectic schedules. Nowadays, we have more and more demands on our time. When something has to give, it seems like fluency lessons are the ones chosen. A couple of years ago, I was fortunate to teach in a district that hired a reading consultant that met with my grade level several times a year. We discussed the reading progress of our students. Dibels was one of the scores we discussed. She told us something interesting that really brought home to me the power of a true balanced literacy program. She said there are typically 3 times that new students are added to the reading specialist rolls. In first grade, students who need the support of the reading specialist are lacking phonemic awareness and phonics skills. In third grade, a new crop of students "suddenly" appear. These students lack phonics skills needed to decode the more academic language that is presented in third grade. These students were usually sight word readers, often teaching themselves to read before they entered school. As you can imagine, when the 3rd grade teacher tells the parent of an early reader that their child needs additional support in reading, there are questions. How did this happen? The last "new crop" of students occurs when a student enters middle school. These students can usually decode and comprehend the meaning of words, but their fluency rate is very low. Middle school students are expected to read vast amounts of material in a short period of time, so even though they can read and comprehend the words, they fall behind in their studies. The bottom line is a quality program needs balance. Where do you find more time in an already hectic day? My answer was to work smarter. We incorporated some fluency activities during our reading group lessons and added a fluency center. My students' fluency rate improved when I became more balanced in my approach to reading. My fluency center uses 3 minute egg timers. I didn't have a stop watch or I would have used 1 minute for the time frame. The handout the partners fill out gives choices for length of time. I found a dozen timers at Oriental trading for $5. Here's a picture: Get your copy here for FREE! I am linking up with Lisa @ Growing Firsties. Hop over and visit her for more fluency ideas.
Finding out what a student knows about phonics is made easy with this quick and simple phonics assessment for K-3 readers! And it's FREE.
Perfect for kids in kindergarten through middle school, these reading comprehension strategies and activities for struggling readers will not disappoint!
These worksheets for main idea and supporting details are a great way to build reading comprehension in young students. Grab the free sample.
Do you have struggling readers you just can't reach? This mega list of reading intervention activities will help you teach all students how to read!
Step by step directions for teachers explaining how to teach students to build reading stamina in order to become independent readers.
Amazing things can happen with just one dot.
If you're working on reading fluency in your upper elementary classroom, check out this blog post! It contains 7 free posters focusing on the various fluency components, along with many other fluency freebies and ideas!
At my school we call them learning buddies but you might know them as reading buddies or big buddies/little buddies. Whatever you call them, some times it’s hard to think of activities to do with them. I often found myself planning things on the fly so I decided to compile a list of activities that […]
I have always assigned nightly reading. Why? I don't assign nightly reading because I want to give students "reading homework." I don't assign nightly reading
A blog post sharing information about why Contraction Surgery is a success in classrooms! Hands-on information is shared. #ContractionSurgery
Each Monday we collaborate with our building's new and Dual Language staff members for a professional development session based on what they highlight as their needs and/or desires for learning! This week we focused on Daily 5 ideas as all of our staff are currently working hard to get their stations and guided reading up and running! The teachers who attending the session came up with a variety of wonderful ideas and activities that could potentially be used throughout the year in these work stations. I thought some of you may enjoy taking a gander at what they came up with as well! Just a little background... we utilized a strategy many of you may be familiar with called "Round Robin" to gather ideas during our meeting. The staff were given the anchor charts with only the titles and asked to add any activity ideas they were doing, would like to do, etc. based on the title on their paper. We gave each group 1 minute to brainstorm and write their ideas, and then they were asked to pass the poster to the next group. We continued to do this until all posters had made it to all groups. This is a great strategy that you could use with your students as well to assess their background knowledge and/or learning of concepts. You could even do it at the beginning of the year to see what activities they already know and enjoy doing during Daily 5 if they are familiar with it from the year past! This may give you some insight as to what they may want to do in your classroom as well! Alright now onto the posters...keep in mind these were quickly written by our staff and we discussed them a bit after as well, so not everything may make perfect sense! But feel free to ask questions in the comments if you have any and I would be happy to try my best to answer! After our meeting, I also took some time to type up all of their ideas onto one page for them to hold on to and refer to throughout the year. You are welcome to a copy if you'd like- just click on the image below :)! (Graphics: Scrappin Doodles, Priscilla Concepcion)
Storyline Online is one of the best sites for viewing children's book read alouds. Let me share some details you might not know yet, and I'll throw in a helpful Freebie you'll use again and again. If you've looked on YouTube for kids books being read aloud you've found thousands of them. Any given children's book title usually has several different uploaded read aloud videos to choose from and there is a wide range in quality. I found Storyline Online this very way, while looking through all the YouTube videos for read alouds. Storyline Online is made possible by the Screen Actors Guild Foundation, SAG-AFTRA. It is absolutely free to use. As I write this they have over fifty children's picture book read aloud videos available. Here's a sample. Each video starts with the actor, or actors, holding the book and giving a book introduction before beginning to read. The camera zooms in on the illustrations, where often little parts of the pictures become animated. Throughout the story you go back and forth between seeing the illustrations and the actor reading the book, so kids never forget they are being read to. Fully animated video movies of children's books are great, to be sure, but it is easy to forget those cartoons come from books. I think when kids watch books being read by live people there is added value and emphasis on reading. Because I had always viewed the Storyline Online videos directly on YouTube, I didn't realize that there are activity guides written for each story, which you can only get on the Storyline Online site. The activity guides, written for teachers mostly, but some with activity guides specifically for parents, are chockfull of ideas– some suggest before, during and after the story discussion points, themes, writing ideas, art, movement, even cooking activities... all sorts of things to choose from. You can find them by going directly to StorylineOnline.net under the All Books tab. You can watch the Storyline Online read aloud videos on YouTube, but when watching on YouTube it is pretty easy to get to other videos and ads, some of which you wouldn't want your kids to view. You can also watch Storyline Online videos directly on StorylineOnline.net, with options of watching via YouTube or SchoolTube, with SchoolTube being the safer option. Either way you choose to watch on the Storyline Online site, when you get to the end of the video, other Storyline Online videos will pop up. That isn't a bad thing, unless you want kids to only watch one particular story, or you want other kids to use the same device and watch that one particular story. So to keep kids on the correct story I created QR codes for the stories through Safe YouTube. Click to download Safe YouTube QR Code cards for Storyline Online videos Safe YouTube is better than safe mode on YouTube, and it takes away all those many buttons and videos that cause distractions and allow kids to click and end up anywhere on YouTube. No online connection is completely safe and kids seem to find a way to other things no matter what, so always keep an eye on what they are watching. I created one for each story on Storyline Online, currently fifty three in total. You can print out the QR Code cards in color, or they come out crisp and clean if you choose to print in black and white. Laminate, cut apart, and you'll have a set of cards for kids to use on any device with a QR Code reader. It will take them to that story and no other. These work great in classrooms as centers, Daily 5 and Readers Workshop stations, and independent reading choices. If you're a parent you'll find them useful at home or on the road with devices. To get this Freebie just click on the picture of QR code cards above. There are six pages in all. I will update as I see new stories appear on Storyline Online. Be sure to Pin this post so you can get to updated pages. I suggest you cruise by StorylineOnline.net to see the full list of read aloud titles. I found many good books there, books I hadn't heard of before. I like to have actual copies of the books the kids are going to listen to, and I like to read the book to my students first, so I can make the most out of that read aloud– focusing on vocabulary, story problem, characters, etc. But if I'm low on cash, Storyline Online is a way to let my kidpeople hear quality books at no cost to me. Many of my favorite Flashlight Press books are there, too, and if you are a regular reader you know how I love Flashlight Press. (News Flash– I'll be giving away another Flashlight Book soon!!) Storyline Online has won lots of awards and that is for very good reason. Good book selections, VERY well read! Hope you found this post about Storyline Online and the activity guides helpful. And I hope you'll download the QR Code cards and find them useful with your kids. I am not being paid or getting any perk for telling you about Storyline Online. I just wanted to share a great resource. See you next time!
An early lesson you want to teach your students is the difference in books that tell stories and books that give information. I have found that the best way to teach this is within context of different types of texts. Let's read more about some resources that I have used to teach the differences in the two types, as well as meet our pesky friend, the BOOK BANDIT! We begin the unit learning the text features of both types of texts by creating this anchor chart and using real text examples to discuss the differences between the two. I print the anchor chart from the pack as a poster, along with the two mini posters, for students to reference throughout the unit. I printed the sorting cards on cardstock and students helped me attach them to the anchor chart during our whole group discussion. They then completed their own sort below. This is great to glue into their reading journal for additional reference during the unit. I have lots of activities that I use included within the pack, but you don't have to use them in the order laid out in this blog post. ;) The activity below is one I like to always do with a new reading skill. My students become reading detectives during this cooperative group activity. Each group gets an envelope with the following recording sheets and a text, which might be a book or a passage, inside. They work with their group to decide if the book tells a story or gives information. They have to prove their thinking by providing three pieces of evidence from the text. After you do a few rotations of these throughout your unit, you can add it to a learning center for additional practice. Throughout the unit, I kept two bins of books labeled books that tell stories and books that give information. I referred to a few of them during the unit. But at the end of the unit, I threw them all over the classroom for students to walk in and find the next morning with a letter from the Book Bandit! He had came in and made a mess of our sorted books, so it was the students' challenge to sort them back into their proper bins. They had to provide three pieces of evidence from the text to prove their thinking and they attached it to a craft of the Book Bandit that they had made. This was such an engaging activity and a great assessment! I have included lots of other resources in the pack to use during your lessons. Throughout the unit, students pretended to be detectives, so they wore these little badges! We used these interactive notebook pieces for different texts. If you have Scholastic flyers, you can have students sort them in these flapbooks. This is another great quick assessment! We always finish our lessons with an exit ticket for me to quickly assess their understanding of the different features of these two types of texts. After completing a unit, I love to give my students new bookmarks for them to use during independent reading just to remind them of the previous skill taught so that they can independently apply those skills during reading. Click any of the pics in the blogpost to check this resource out! As always, happy teaching and happy reading!
Then, we used a little total physical response to give my firsties a better visual on how the size of the places we live are related. They *loved* this
Teaching students to sequence and summarize stories is crucial to their reading comprehension of fiction texts. These reading crafts are fresh, hands on and unique fiction activities for supporting students in breaking down sequencing and summarizing key events. It is an alternative to reading response that will help you to reach all learners in your classroom. These summarizing and sequencing activities require little to no prep, and the only materials needed are scissors and glue (word rings needed for the "key" events ring craft). WHAT’S INCLUDED: 8 Sequencing and Summarizing Crafts: Sequencing Movie Reel: Students illustrate and describe 5 key events in the story in the order that they happened. A large (full page) and small (2/page) movie reel options are included, as well as options for illustrations and descriptions or illustrations only. Film Strip Lift the Flap: This craft is similar to the craft above, but is a one page only option. Timeline Lift the Flap: Students record events from the story in a book shaped timeline. They illustrate the important events on the front of the flap and describe it on the back page. Summarizing Bookworm: Students can record as many key events as they want on this bookworm craft. Each event is a segment they add to build their bookworm. Lift the Flap Storyboard: Students create a storyboard of 6 or 12 scenes from the story, and describe each scene under their drawings. 5 Finger Retell Book: Students fill in the palm of each hand to create a retell book. Options are included for students to fill in "First, Next, Then, After that, Finally" or "Characters, Setting, Beginning, Middle, End." "Key" Events Key Ring: Students write events on each key. Keys number 1-9 are included, as well as a blank option with no number. Somebody...Wanted...But...So...Then Lift the Flap: Students fill in the flaps to create a S.W.B.S.T. summary.
