Reading Makes Us Smarter!!

Students enjoy having time for reading during class.  Some days I give students 25 minutes during class to read assigned chapters and answer questions to go along with the chapters.  Sometimes we do reading in small and large groups, and other times we have indpendent reading time.

 

Research It Up!

Students have started performing research on owning pets.  Three of our classes and soon to be all of our classes have been reading chapter books about dogs.  I decided it would be fitting for students to perform research on types of pets to own.  The research they are doing is requiring them to gather information about the type of care the animal will need, type of food the animal has to have, the shelter it needs, etc.  The research product will be an informational brochure after all the information has been gathered. 

 

 

We love learning together!!

 

Students have been doing several activities in groups. They really enjoy working collaboratively. We have been learning a lot about plot, setting, theme, characters, and other story elements while reading lots of literature including 3 different chapter books. Students have really enjoyed reading and doing activities in class in groups as well as independent activities. Students have also enjoyed reading online passages and having opportunities to use technology to answer questions about the passage. 

 

 

Students enjoy popcorn reading in small groups!! This is a good strategy to use with students because they never know who is going to be called on; therefore, all students will keep up in with the reading so they will know where to start reading if called on.  They are in competition with other groups in the class not to get "strikes" against them for not keeping up with the group as the text is being read. 

 

Students have enjoyed using the computer in center rotations for looking up definitions to unknown vocabulary words.  While some students were using the computers to look up meanings of unknown words, others were using dictionaries.