Wondering how to improve analytical skills? Just pick up a book! Readingfictiono is not only an effective way to improve, but also an enjoyable one.
Hello Cozy Readers! Do you belong to a book club? If not, why not get your friends together and start one! To get the discussion going, we’ve put together a list of some great questions that …
These are the best book club questions for any book.
10 generic book club questions for awesome book discussions! Works for any book & includes a free printable guide.
Many of you are familiar that we do a monthly book club here at Lars. Along with featuring a new book, we collaborate with a new artist to create a print and bookmarks inspired by the book. They always turn out so beautifully and appropriate for each title! We decided it was high time that we […]
Pink Themed Book Club Questions for Book Club Meetings or Parties. File is a PDF for printing. There is no background color in the file but I recommend printing on a cream or light pink paper for *razzle dazzle* but you don't have to! Check out my other themed book club questions for your next meeting! Free mockup photo used: Image by Freepik
Look for books for your book club in 2021? I have the top 21 book club books for 2021 right here for you. There's something for everyone.
Sometimes it’s hard to figure out what to read next, especially if you’re in a bit of a book slump. A reading challenge is a great way to help you start turning those pages with purpose again!
Whether your little one is a new reader or into their own chapter books, starting your own book club for kids is easy with these tips and tricks!
Still searching for a book that's as gripping as 'Gone Girl'? Look no further...
Sarah Penner's The Lost Apothecary will make you want to take a solo jaunt to England (or wherever your fondness lies) and go on an adv...
My literacy blocks are beginning their first book clubs. They will be reading and discussing books in a series. They were supposed to do th...
I really love to teach guided reading groups. It is always interesting and you really get to see how every student is unique in how they learn and process all the information. I like to see them make progress and move up reading levels and also REALLY comprehend what they are reading on another level. Amazing. I know many teachers may have struggled with this question before like I have...What do I do with those high readers? In second grade they are just not quite ready to start literature circles, but the daily small group guided reading is too slow and boring for them. I try to do something in between. I still want to meet with them to make sure we aren't missing an important piece of their reading instruction, but I also want them to become independent and really connect with their reading. Here are a few ideas that I have used for those readers that are really ready to move beyond the small group guided reading. I create a reading passport for these students. We put their picture on the front. Every time they finish a book, they add the title to their passport. In the passport, they can keep track of how many fiction and nonfiction books they read. This passport can be used for all levels! Reading Passport I meet with the group to introduce their book and have the discussions about predictions, unusual vocabulary, and any connections we might have. Then they go on their own to read as a group to the assigned chapter and complete a portion of their Book Club Notes. We always discuss ahead of time what the expectation is and what portion of the notes I will be looking for at our next meeting. They love the independence and take this very seriously! Book Club Notes I also like to provide something more for some of my other groups that are working above level, but not ready for this much independence. I just continue with our regular guided reading groups, but have them use a small bookmark to add their thinking and summarizing. I have a fiction or nonficiton bookmark. I add this to their book bag and they complete a portion at a time and bring it back to group for our discussions. Reading Groups Book Mark (Fiction) Reading Groups Bookmark (nonfiction) Sometimes I need a few reminders about asking those higher order thinking questions...for all my groups! I like to keep this list of question starters in my guided reading binder to help me remember to push them to think about their thinking! Higher Order Thinking Questions I can't wait to really get to work in my guided reading groups!
Your success depends on your self-development. Here's a list of my top favorites and best personal development books everyone should read.
It’s no secret that I love reading. I’ve always got a few books on the go and at any given moment am a part of two to four different book clubs. I don’t just enjoy reading though, I also enjoy making book lists, talking about books, writing about books, shopping for books, scoring a cheap…
From heartbreaking World War II stories to dramas based on the lives of historic figures.
Nine middle grade and young adult titles that take place in the Middle East that incorporate the variety of religion, culture and traditions you'll find.
Call them what you may: literature circles, book clubs, literature study, etc., getting students in a small group of their peers to discuss a book that they're all reading is one of the most enjoyable
Is “reading more books” on a list of your New Year resolutions? Retreat by Random House have prepared the 2014 edition of a printable Reading Bingo. It contains 24 reading challenges th…
This huge Reading Worksheet Printable Pack features 100 different printables for bookwork activities. There are both fiction and non-fiction printables that are able to be used with ANY TEXT which means that this pack can be reused all year round. There are SO many different activities which allow students to practice and develop many reading-related skills. They are great for developing comprehension which is one of the most important reading skills. Many of the activities also call for higher-order thinking. The printables cover: ♥ Story Elements – Setting, Plot, Characters, Problem, Solution, Sequence of Events. There are a number of diverse and creative activities. ♥ Reading Strategies – Inferring, predicting, summarizing, synthesizing, questioning, visualizing. ♥ Text Connections – Text-to-Self, Text-to-Text, Text-to-World ♥ Author Study – Author’s purpose, lesson, point-of-view, questions. ♥ Non-Fiction Texts - Main idea, Summarizing, Text Features, Diagrams, graphic organizers, learning reflection. ♥ Vocabulary Work – Finding word meanings, replacing “boring” words, finding interesting words. ♥ Nouns, Adjectives & Verbs – Generating adjectives for setting/character, finding these parts of speech within the text. Please see the preview for full view of printables!!! Includes both a US and an AUS/UK Version ♥♥♥ Follow me to be the first to hear about FREEBIES and updates ♥♥♥ ♥♥♥ Earn TPT Credits when you leave feedback ♥♥♥ I welcome and appreciate any feedback, comments or suggestions. You may also contact me on [email protected]
Every once in a while I'll stumble upon a new-to-me author and feel immediately compelled to read everything they've ever written—preferably before the
Prepare to teach Harper Lee's classic To Kill a Mockingbird with these texts, including 3 poems, a creed, an informational text, chart, and video.
Thank you to Diane for submitting this fun book report poster. It’s legal size (paper) worksheet and is great for lower grades (or as an easy project for upper grades). Great end of the year …
As our reading tutor training continues, we’ve learned a lot of great new ideas about how to teach the basics of reading and phonics to students of all ages, especially students that are English language learners (ELL). One of the things that we’ve done some extensive work with is the vowel circle. The vowel circle is composed of five categories designed to help students recognize vowels patterns in their spelling and in their every day speech. It starts out with the first group that is the smilers. Smilers are vowels or vowel patterns that, when said, have your mouth form a smile-like shape, such as the “ee” in cheese or the “ay” in play. Next come the open vowels. When open vowels or vowel patterns are used the mouth usually ends in an open position, such as the “aw” in saw. The round vowels are ones that usually leave your mouth in a rounded position with your lips slightly puckered, such as the “o-e” in tune or the “oa” in coat. The crazy r’s are there to remind students that r’s make vowels do crazy things that they wouldn’t do around other consonants and that –er, -ir and –ur all sound the same in a word. The sliders are an interesting category because they make your mouth slide from one position (either open, round or smiler) to another, such as the “ou” in out when your mouth slides from open to smiler. The vowel circle is a great tool to use in many elementary grade levels. It really helps students to make associations with vowels and create connections in their brains where they might not have had them before. The vowel circle enables the students to connect vowel sounds to a visual (the pictures in the circle and the actual text of the vowel pattern) to a sound, to a feel in their mouths. Students that use the vowel circle correctly and constantly in class and small group have shown a marked improvement in both their spelling and their decoding skills. If you’re working in an elementary school or simply want to work on pronunciation at home, looking at the vowel circle is a good place to start. Happy Reading!
Puzzle-solving genius kids form a pint-size crime-fighting Mod Squad in this month's Backseat Book Club pick. Trenton Lee Stewart, author of The Mysterious Benedict Society, takes questions from young readers about the book's twists, turns and creative conundrums.
Matchbook chapter summaries super simple and fun project that you can have your students complete during your next novel study.
TOP TEN TUESDAY January 20, 2015 It’s Top Ten Tuesday, hosted by the wonderful blog at The Broke and the Bookish! This week’s topic was a freebie so I chose: My Top Ten Fantasy Books (s…
Ok, just because I've been gone from 'blogging land' doesn't mean we haven't been working hard in 4B. I've definitely been documenting a lot of what we've been doing! To start, it was clear to me that our old way of peer conferencing just wasn't working. Kids seemed to be goofing around, not really helping each other, and it was a waste of everyone's time. It frustrated me when most of my one-on-one conference time was spent managing unruly PEER conferences. I knew something had to change. I decided to revamp our workshop so that our peer conferences would hold both the author and the peer more accountable AND work on our 6-traits language. I introduced our 'new' method for peer conferencing using this anchor chart to document our process. After students finish drafting, they are to grab a 6-traits peer conferencing sheet and assess themselves by circling all the descriptors for each trait that they feel match their own writing. Mind you, we did a lot of whole-class practice with scoring writing based on the 6-traits criteria so students would feel comfortable doing this process on their own (and being HONEST!). Through our mini-lessons we've learned that it's possible to have high scores in some traits but lower scores in others. That's how we grow! Here you see Devin circling where he thinks his writing falls on our 6-traits rubric. (Note: The link to the 6-traits peer conferencing sheet above will bring you to an even more updated version than the one shown in this blog posting! Just FYI!) Here's another student assessing her own writing after she's drafted. This student has finished assessing her writing using our rubric. She decides on a final number score and circles it to the left of the descriptors. Then it's time to meet with a peer. (We have a peer conference sign-up sheet in our room which helps students know which other students in the room are also ready to peer conference.) Here you see this author reading his story to his peer. After he's done reading, he will explain to his peer the scores he gave himself and why. It's important for the peer to listen carefully to the author because it will soon be her turn to assign a score to this author for each trait . On the lines on the rubric, she will write to explain the scores she gives him. The peer needs to follow the following sentence stems in his/her scoring response: * I give this a writer a ___ because... * This writer needs to work on ... This process requires peers to truly work together, hold each other accountable, and it gets the kids using our 6-traits language a lot more. The second sentence stem helps the writer establish a goal for what to work on when revising! To see more of this peer conferencing process, watch a clip of us practicing this stage! Our focus lately has been on the trait of organization. We've been looking thoroughly at different beginnings and endings of both student and published writing. Here is our anchor chart documenting what we noticed! In other Writer's Workshop news, these are a few additional anchor charts we have in our room to help keep our writing organized. This anchor chart reminds us of powerful words to use to spice up 'said'! In reading we have been working hard on purposeful talk.This is so very important to the social construction of knowledge in any classroom! It's essential to teach students purposeful talk behaviors before even considering literature discussion groups (LDGs). The majority of kids talk like...well, KIDS! So, if we expect kids to talk like mature young people about different texts they read, we need to explicitly teach them how! Talking about Text by Maria Nichols is a great place to start if you're interesting in learning more about purposeful talk behaviors. I taught each of the behaviors individually through two separate mini-lessons - one day to explain 'hearing all voices' in a concrete way (without text), and a second day to practice 'hearing all voices' using text. Then I taught 'saying something meaningful' in a concrete way without using text, and the next day we practiced 'saying something meaningful' using text , and so on. Eventually all of the purposeful talk behaviors kind of blended together and kids started to discover that we often need to use all of these things at the same time in order to truly talk purposefully about anything! We did a lot of practicing, and I've been taping students in this process. Here is a clip of students practicing their behaviors while they talk about their families. (We had read a few books about different kinds of families to foster a safe environment to celebrate the fact that we all have different kinds of families!) We also had students practice their purposeful talk behaviors while discussing their best or worst memory in school (which helped warm up their brains for a timed writing activity we did during writer's workshop). Here is a clip! As a class, we watched these video clips to analyze our body language and other purposeful talk behaviors. I think taping and analyzing is a very effective way for students to learn how they should look and sound in an LDG. 'Keeping the lines of thinking alive' is a tough concept for many youngsters. Sometimes what happens is that students take turns talking, but they don't really build on what the person before them said. In other words, they don't really DISCUSS, they just share and listen. We applauded the first group in this clip because they had good body language and were respectful as listeners, but we discovered their conversation needed to be more 'alive' by asking questions and making connections to each other's ideas and thoughts. Mrs. Pierce and I taped ourselves doing a weak LDG and a strong LDG. As we watched each example, we used dots and lines to 'map out' our conversations (see chart below). In the weak LDG, we discovered Mrs. Pierce and I shared a lot of individual thoughts. The thought started, and then it stopped. There was really no discussion about anything we said; and Mrs. Pierce wasn't even looking at me during part of our time together! How rude! ;) In the strong LDG example, we mapped out a lot of dots and lines that were connected because we took each other's ideas and built on them. We truly discussed the text to dig deeper. We introduced several conversational moves for students to use to help get their voice heard in a conversation. Students also have these conversational moves on a bookmark that they keep in their LDG books. After we learned the respectful ways to speak and act when discussing with others, it was time to teach our kids how to flag their thinking. This is a crucial step to holding a successful literature discussion group because it allows the kids to track their important thoughts while reading so they have ideas for discussion the next day. Here are the 'codes' we use to track our thinking on post-its. We encourage students to use one of our codes to categorize the kind of thought they have and then write a few words to trigger their thought. This helps them when they get into a discussion group; they'll actually have pinpointed ideas to discuss! Students kept a chart in their Thoughtful Logs with all of our codes on it for easy reference. Here's a clip of our students as they practice flagging their thinking for the first time. The next day, students put all their new learning to the test. We put them in small groups to discuss the text "Slower Than the Rest" which is a short realistic fiction story out of Cynthia Rylant's book Every Living Thing. On another day, we used a high-interest two-page non-fiction text about leeches to continue practicing flagging our thoughts. Here's a clip of our kids flagging their thinking just after we modeled it during our mini-lesson. Below are some pictures of the kids' flagged thoughts. In addition to purposeful talk, we've also been studying the historical fiction genre. We've read several mentor texts, including Dakota Dugout by Ann Turner and Dandelions by Eve Bunting. Our first round of literature discussion books are all within the historical fiction genre. Here are a few of our historical fiction LDGs hard at work: Dear Levi: Letters from the Overland Trail Scraps of Time: Abby Takes a Stand The River and the Trace (I think I put my finger over the microphone at minute 2:00!) Oftentimes, historical fiction books will have a flashback in them. One group's book, called A Scrap of Time: Abby Takes a Stand by Patricia McKissick, has a flashback that occurs towards the beginning of the story. I photocopied some of the pages to try to explain this technique during a whole class mini-lesson. In the first section of the book, three grandkids are spending time with their grandma in her attic. They find an old menu and ask their grandma why she saved it. Chapters 1 through 12 flash back to 1960, where 'grandma' is just 10-years-old, living in Nashville, Tennessee at the time of a lot of civil rights protests. The menu is from a restaurant where a lot of sit-ins took place. Through the flashback a reader learns all about life during the 1960s. In the final section of the book, a reader finds him/herself back in the present - in grandma's attic, where the three grandkids ask their grandma some questions about her life during the sixties. There was also another flashback in the story Dakota Dugout by Ann Turner. We also read The Wreck of the Zephyr by Chris VanAllsburg as an example of a flashback in a fantasy book! In other reading news, here is a picture of the anchor chart that stored all the non-fiction text features we've learned. In social studies, we've been studying the economy of the five U.S. regions. Students have been reading small sections of non-fiction leveled readers to summarize a product or industry that is important to each region's economy. Students are typing up their summaries and we're calling those summaries 'articles' as they each create a magazine of our economy. Through this project, students have learned to: * Summarize main ideas * Center and left-justify their cursor * Use the tab key to indent * Change font size, color, and style * Bold, underline, and italicize * Safe image searches * Copy and paste * Cite their picture resources Here is the inside of one student's magazine. Next week we will be using this site to create magazine covers! Lastly, we had a chance to meet with our second-grade buddies earlier this month. We split the buddies up into two groups and one group stayed with Mrs. Adams to play holiday bingo. The other group was with me in the computer lab. Buddies used this site to play a variety of math and English games. One of the most popular games to play was called 'Story Plant' where students could click on different leaves to create the beginning to a unique story. Depending on what leaves were clicked, you would get a different combination of characters, settings, problems, etc. The computer generates a beginning to a story that the kids can print off and finish during writer's workshop! Have a wonderful weekend!
Firstly, Miss Dashwood of Yet Another Period Drama Blog had a lovely Period Drama Dress Quiz last week which was amazing good fun! My kn...
Short stories are such a wonderful medium for telling stories and exploring interesting ideas, and I love encouraging people to read more of them. So, to celebrate the amazingness of short stories, here’s my list of The Best Short Stories of All Time! For anyone who wants to check these out, I’ve set it up ...
The Humans by Matt Haig is ultimately a book about humans for humans. It will help to open your eyes to the beauty that we tend to forget is around us.
I have some FUN NEWS! I'm thrilled + excited to announce that I am working with Gibbs Smith on my first book (they've published Tara Geurard's amazing wedding books and Kimberly Whitman's entertaining books!). I
The wonders of books are endless – they can eliminate your stress, increase your happiness, and boost your intelligence. Whether you’ve crossed out some
Hello and welcome back to this series of “How to Actually Teach Reading Comprehension.” For more topics such as this one, I’d love for you to sign up for my monthly “How to Actually Teach” newsletters found HERE. Today’s topic is all about teaching Main Idea. This tends to be a very difficult topic for students, […]
Lean into Merriam-Webster's official Word of the Year with some stellar feminist reading.
Trying to figure out what new books releasing in 2024 to read this year? This list of anticipated adult fiction is your reading guide!
In this week’s Like, Try, Why, we’re bringing you reading recommendations for fans of Lola and the Boy Next Door...
