2015 | Crafting Connections
Receive tips, freebies, and resource updates when you subscribe to my newsletter!

FREE Guided Reading Lesson Plans

Tuesday, December 29, 2015

This is a two-part blog post!

My primary purpose for writing this blog post is to share another set of guided reading lesson plans with you! Again, these aren't fancy, but they are lessons plans that worked for me. I wrote these plans a few years back when I was reading the book Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great  by Judy Blume with a small group of fourth grade students. If you happen to have multiple copies of this Level R book available, I'd love to be able to share these lesson plans with you, and save you from having to write your own plans. I know how time-consuming it is to write guided reading lesson plans each week! (Amazon affiliate link follows.)

My students and I really enjoyed this book. One of the reasons I enjoyed this book is because there are multiple times in this book that the 1972 copyright date is obvious, and it leads to some interesting discussions. As you will see if you download the lesson plans, the copyright date comes into play already in the first chapter when Judy Blume references a record. Later in the book, she mentions a "milk door" and a "mimeograph machine". My favorite way to explain these outdated concepts to students is to simply grab my iPad, go to google images, type in the phrase, and then show them the photograph and explain how it worked "back in the old days". 

If you have a Level R guided reading group and access to multiple copies of this Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great, feel free to click on the image and download the PDF version of the lesson plans!
 Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great Lesson Plans

(If you'd like to see the other free guided reading lesson plans I have available, click on the links below.)
Shiloh (Level R)
Flat Stanley (Level M)


My secondary purpose for writing this blog post is to invite you to check out my new YouTube video. This was created by the amazingly talented Kayse Morris!  I thoroughly enjoyed working with Kayse on this project- her enthusiasm is positively contagious! I think she did a wonderful job, and would highly recommend her to anyone who is thinking about making a similar video.


I versus Me: A FREE Grammar PowerPoint

Monday, December 28, 2015

This was the conversation that took place at my house about a month ago: 

Brooke (my third grader): Emma played with Lily and me at recess today.

Kayla (my fifth grader who likes to correct her younger sister): Lily and I.

              Me: No, Kayla. She was actually right. "Lily and me" is the correct way                             to word  that particular sentence.

Kayla: No, it isn't. My teacher always corrects us when we say it that way. 
It's always supposed to be "Lily and I".

I won't bore you with the rest of the conversation. Needless to say, however, despite many attempts to try to explain why "Lily and me" was correct grammar usage in that sentence, I wasn't able to convince Kayla that I knew what I was talking about. Like most kids, Kayla thinks her teachers are much more knowledgeable than her mom. :) (By the way, I don't believe Kayla's teacher really taught her that misinformation... it's more likely that Kayla came to the conclusion on her own after hearing her teacher correct multiple classmates that truly should have used "(Name) and I" in a sentence.)

Actually, I can relate to Kayla's overgeneralization of the rule. When I was younger, I always thought that "(Name) and I" was the rule that should be applied to every sentence, too. I specifically remember the exact high school English class where I learned that me should be used instead of I when the pronoun is the object of the verb. For example, in Brooke's sentence above, "Lily and me" are the objects of played.  I is a subject pronoun, while me is an object pronoun. Therefore, in this sentence, "Lily and me" is correct.

This is a common grammar error among many upper elementary students. Frankly, I even know many adults who make the same mistake when speaking or writing. Therefore, the conversation inspired me to create this short "I versus Me PowerPoint"! 

This PowerPoint is FREE in my store, so go ahead and download it if it's a minilesson that might benefit your students. 
Do you have students who struggle with using I and me as pronouns in their speaking and writing? This grammar topic is confusing to many students... and even some adults! If this is a challenging grammar topic for your students, check out this free I and me lesson! It includes a FREE PowerPoint and handout!

I start with some basic sentence slides where students fill in the blank with "I" or "me".
Do you have students who struggle with using I and me as pronouns in their speaking and writing? This grammar topic is confusing to many students... and even some adults! If this is a challenging grammar topic for your students, check out this free I and me lesson! It includes a FREE PowerPoint and handout!

After the brief review, I introduce the structure "(Name) and ____".
Do you have students who struggle with using I and me as pronouns in their speaking and writing? This grammar topic is confusing to many students... and even some adults! If this is a challenging grammar topic for your students, check out this free I and me lesson! It includes a FREE PowerPoint and handout!


Do you have students who struggle with using I and me as pronouns in their speaking and writing? This grammar topic is confusing to many students... and even some adults! If this is a challenging grammar topic for your students, check out this free I and me lesson! It includes a FREE PowerPoint and handout!
               
                                The direction instruction slides, look like this:
Do you have students who struggle with using I and me as pronouns in their speaking and writing? This grammar topic is confusing to many students... and even some adults! If this is a challenging grammar topic for your students, check out this free I and me lesson! It includes a FREE PowerPoint and handout!

Do you have students who struggle with using I and me as pronouns in their speaking and writing? This grammar topic is confusing to many students... and even some adults! If this is a challenging grammar topic for your students, check out this free I and me lesson! It includes a FREE PowerPoint and handout!

Finally, the PowerPoint concludes with 8 practice slides like the ones below:

Do you have students who struggle with using I and me as pronouns in their speaking and writing? This grammar topic is confusing to many students... and even some adults! If this is a challenging grammar topic for your students, check out this free I and me lesson! It includes a FREE PowerPoint and handout!

Do you have students who struggle with using I and me as pronouns in their speaking and writing? This grammar topic is confusing to many students... and even some adults! If this is a challenging grammar topic for your students, check out this free I and me lesson! It includes a FREE PowerPoint and handout!

It also includes a PowerPoint companion handout where students can record their answers on the handout as you progress through the PowerPoint.
Do you have students who struggle with using I and me as pronouns in their speaking and writing? This grammar topic is confusing to many students... and even some adults! If this is a challenging grammar topic for your students, check out this free I and me lesson! It includes a FREE PowerPoint and handout!


Most of the amazing clip art shown above is by A Sketchy Guy. The clip art on the green slide is by Educlips

I hope you like the PowerPoint and it's beneficial for your students. 
Thanks for stopping by!

Math Properties- Connecting with the Terms

Friday, December 11, 2015
Commutative, associative, distributive... the math property terms can be a bit intimidating for elementary students being introduced to the addition and multiplication properties. I know some teachers who rename the commutative property the "flip-flop property", but personally, I'm not a big fan of renaming challenging words. A few years back, I was helping one of my ELL students complete a math assignment. She was supposed to match the equation in Column A to the addition property that was being modeled in Column B. When she saw the problem (5 + 8 = 8 + 5), her eyes lit up and she said, "Oh, I know this! It's the flip-flop property!" Of course, she was exactly correct... but "flip flop property" was not one of the answer choices.

She sat there, tapping her pencil to her lips. I read the answer choices to her, and told her that one of them was the official word for "the flip flop property". Clearly taking a random guess, she pointed to one of the words and asked, "Is it this one?"

As an ESL teacher, I strongly believe in teaching students strategies that will help them decipher meanings of unknown words- whether it's by using context clues, finding a base word, or looking for a root, prefix, or suffix. In terms of learning the math property words, finding a base word is the ideal strategy. The anchor chart below shows how I extract the base words and place each within the context of a sentence to help students make a meaningful connection between the word and the meaning of the property. I also like to attach each property to a visual cue (another ESL teaching strategy) to deepen the connection.
Math Properties Anchor Chart! Teach students about the commutative, associative, distributive and identity properties this this anchor chart!
If you would like to create this anchor chart yourself, click HERE. If you print page 2 of the preview, you can color and cut out the images (by Educlips and A Sketchy Guy) on this page and use in on your anchor chart.

I recently created two math property PowerPoints (one for addition, and one for multiplication), and I used the same method described above. These slides show how I introduced each term.

Teach students the meaning of the commutative property of addition and multiplication by first making a visual connection to the term!
Teach students the meaning of the identity property of addition and multiplication by first making a visual connection to the word!
Teach students the meaning of the associative property of addition and multiplication by first making a visual connection to the word!

Teach students the meaning of the distributive property by first making a visual connection to the word!


Thanks for stopping by!

~Deb

Summarizing Nonfiction Text During a Social Studies Lesson (with a free graphic organizer!)

Sunday, November 29, 2015
In the past, teaching students to write nonfiction summaries was probably my least favorite ELA topic to teach.  Why? I didn't feel like I was very good at writing them myself! Narrowing down paragraphs and/or pages of seemingly important information to 2-3 sentences has always been an arduous task for me. (Just ask my husband... I have a knack for leaving looooooong phone messages with tons of unimportant details. When I finish leaving the message, he usually says, "You know, Deb, you could've just said ----".)

Therefore, it should come as no surprise that I put off creating Summarizing Nonfiction materials again and again... and again. It was added to my "to do" list two years ago, and it sat there untouched until this past week when I sat down at my computer, took a deep breath, and refused to let my mind wander toward another, more enjoyable topic! 

Once I started, it really wasn't all that bad. In fact, after researching various summarizing strategies, my creative juices started flowing, and I ended up teaching myself how to write a really good nonfiction summary, if I do say so myself!! The anchor chart below sums up the step-by-step process I created:
Use this summarizing anchor chart as you teach your students how to summarize a nonfiction text. It features the five steps needed to write a strong nonfiction summary.


Step #3 is my favorite. It provides the support my analytical mind needs to start writing a summary. I used this process to write about 25 summaries this past week, and it worked every time. Beyond that, whenever I wrote that first main idea sentence, gleaning the most important details no longer seemed daunting.

When I use this anchor chart in the classroom, I plan to create it with students after I have introduced Summarizing Nonfiction during Language Arts using my PowerPoint, and after my students have had the opportunity to write their own nonfiction summaries using my passages.

I intend to use this anchor chart as part of a Social Studies lesson. I will model how students can use this process to summarize a lesson from their Social Studies textbook. Before class I will have the heading and sentences (in black) already written on the chart paper. After a quick review of the writing nonfiction summaries process, we will read and discuss the lesson.
Writing a Nonfiction Summary Anchor Chart
I used Lesson #4 in Chapter 4 of the 4th grade Pearson social studies text called
My World: Regions of our Country for my anchor chart above.

When we are done reading the 6-page lesson, we will work through the steps on the anchor chart to write a 3-sentence summary. 


Click on the following links to check out my Summarizing Nonfiction resources:

Writing a Nonfiction Summary PowerPoint- It's simple if you just have the right combination!

Finally, if you want to try this method with your own students, feel free to download this graphic organizer. (It also includes the anchor chart image in case you want to replicate the anchor chart.)

Thanks for stopping by!

~Deb

Four-Star Reading Responses

Wednesday, October 14, 2015
When I was a 4th/5th grade reading teacher, I fell in love with the Say Something response assignment. Are you familiar with this reading response activity?  When students finish reading, they are given a Post-it note, and they get to choose whether they:

  • ask a question.
  • make a comment.
  • make a prediction.
  • clarify something.
  • make a connection.

When our guided reading group time was almost over, it was so simple to hand students a Post-it note (that could serve as a bookmark), tell students to finish reading a chapter, and, as an assignment, "say something" on the Post-it note that they will share the following day when the group meets again.

When I first tried this response with students, I quickly figured out that giving them the above list was not enough. As a teacher, you definitely need to model what a well-written Say Something Post-it note looks like!  If you don't model, you will definitely see minimal effort in the form of notes that look like the 1-star notes below.

Four-Star Reading Responses Anchor Chart. Use this anchor chart to show your students between a vague 1-star response and a detailed 4-star response!

Recently I ran across this blog post by Chartchums, where they created an anchor chart that showed the progression from a 1-star Post-it note to a 4-star Post-it note for their second graders. I thought it was such a great idea that I was inspired to create a similar anchor chart for upper elementary students based on the Say Something Post-it Note reading strategy.

The Post-it note examples on this chart are based on the book The Name of this Book Is Secret (The Secret Series) by Pseudonymous Bosch. (This book would make an excellent mystery read-aloud, by the way!) (Amazon affiliate link follows.)
I especially like the visual element- it is clearly and immediately evident to students that shorter responses are worth only 1-star because they lack details. In order to write a 4-star Post-it note, students must strive for higher-level thinking that includes details and thorough explanations. When I share this anchor chart with students in the future, I plan to show them the anchor chart on the first day, and discuss what makes each Post-it note deserve that number of stars. On the second day, after students have written their own independent Post-it note responses, I will have each student bring his or her note to the anchor chart and line it up with where they believe their Post-it note should be placed. For example, if a student wrote a prediction, I would have him look at the 4 prediction Post-it notes on the anchor chart and decide which most resembles the type of response that he wrote. After a few days of doing this, hopefully students will be writing 3- and 4- star Post-it note responses!

I was going to make my own Say Something bookmarks to attach to this blog post, but after doing a quick search on TpT, I found that some fabulous bookmarks already exist! Check out these freebies by Let's Geaux Teach!

Do you have any tricks for getting students to write detailed responses to what they've read?  I'd love to hear your ideas!

Finding a Partner Idea... with a FREE download!

Tuesday, October 6, 2015
If you have ELLs in your classroom, you understand the importance of giving them an opportunity to talk and converse with others while using academic vocabulary.  When students are allowed to formulate their own sentences using academic vocabulary based on what they have learned, they are more likely to retain that information. (By academic vocabulary, I am referring to the terms that do not usually come up in day-to-day conversation, but are vital for students for students who are working toward mastering subject area content... words like condensation, evaporation, and precipitation.) And, like the majority of ELL strategies, conversing with partners is not only beneficial for the ELLs in your classroom, but for ALL students.

As an ESL teacher who co-taught in upper elementary classrooms, you can bet that I was frequently telling students to "turn to a partner and discuss...". Think-Pair-Shares were an everyday occurrence. (Read more about Think-Pair-Shares HERE.) The one downside to this partnering idea is that students were limited to the classmates who were sitting directly beside them.

A few weeks ago, I was paging through Total Participation Techniques: Making Every Student an Active Learner by Persida and William Himmele (which is an excellent, teacher-friendly book, by the way!) and I found an intriguing idea! This would solve the problem of students always sharing with the same partners, and I am pretty sure kids would love the idea of the business-like atmosphere!  I had never heard of this activity, but it struck me as so clever that I just had to share it on my blog, in case there are others who are looking for a new "find-a-partner" activity.

You begin by taking 5 minutes and having students fill out the following appointment page. (Click on the image to download it.)
Looking for a new, exciting way for your students to pick a partner to work with? Check out this blog post and download this free printable!

Students simply walk around the classroom and set "appointments" with classmates. In order to do this, both students have to select a time that is open on both of their agendas, and write each other's name in the time slot. (If you have an odd number of students, one person may have to partner with you, or have that students join an existing pair to create a threesome- your choice.) Also, make it clear that students are not allowed to turn down a classmate's appointment request unless the time slot is already filled on their paper.

When everybody's agendas are filled in, voila!  You have a new pairing tool that gets students up and out of their seats and paired with different partners. Then, anytime you want students to discuss or share with a partner, you have the option of having everyone pull out their appointment sheet, find their 2:00 appointment, and share the response. I might have everyone tape it to the inside cover of a certain notebook for consistent, easy access.

If you decide to try this activity, I would love to hear how it goes!  Have a great week!

Tricks and Treats: FREE downloads!

Monday, September 28, 2015
How is it possible that October is right around the corner?  And October means... Halloween!  At my house, my daughters have already compiled a list of "possible Halloween costumes".  The topic comes up from time to time throughout the year, but the conversation gets serious once October sets in!

Halloween is obviously on the minds of most of our students while they are at school, too.  So... why not channel this excitement into engaging learning opportunities? My fellow collaborators at Upper Elementary Snapshots and I have put together a "Tricks and Treats Ebook for Upper Elementary" where we each share a trick (a helpful teaching tip) and a treat (a FREE printable)!


My free printable is my Halloween Point of View worksheet. It contains four passages. Students read each passage and determine which point of view the author used- first person, second person, third person limited, or third person omniscient. Click on the image to download the ebook and access all eleven tricks and treats!

Ordering Adjectives... Who knew?

Friday, September 25, 2015
Which sentence is ordered correctly?
A.  We climbed into Dad's red, rusty, old pickup truck.
B.  We climbed into Dad's old, red, rusty pickup truck.
C.  We climbed into Dad's rusty, old, red pickup truck.

C is ordered correctly. It's obvious, right? To those of us who are native English speakers, it's the only one that "sounds" right. To my ear, A and B just sound awkward and clunky.

I must confess, that's how I went about figuring out the order of adjectives for the first 30-some years of my life. I went with what sounded right.

Then, I met up with the Common Core State Standards...  CCSS ELA-Literacy.L.4.1.D to be precise. Order adjectives within sentences according to convention patterns (e.g., a small red bag rather than a red small bag). Yep, it turns out that there are "rules" when it comes to ordering adjectives. 




A few weeks ago, a friend emailed me and asked me if I would be willing to create some resources to match this fourth grade standard. I jumped at the opportunity. As an ESL teacher of 14 years, I believe this is an important language standard.  It struck me that I had been able to get along just fine for decades without knowing any specific "rules" regarding the placement of adjectives within sentences by just figuring out which option "sounded right". The ELLs in our classrooms, however, often aren't quite as lucky. Most of them simply do not have the advantage of being able to determine which option sounds "right", and which option sounds "clunky".

I set out to create a handful of engaging, student-friendly materials to address this standard.   As you can see, most of the materials I created are related to the idea of "sliding adjectives into sentences" in the correct order. Just click on the image if you want to take a closer look!

Teach your students how to correctly order multiple adjectives in a sentence with this PowerPoint. Students will learn the rules for ordering adjectives.



Ordering Adjectives Sorting Activity and Reference Guide



Clearly, I have no recollection at all of learning this when I was younger. I'm curious... do you remember learning how to correctly insert adjectives into sentences when you were younger?


~Deb

Putting the "Think" into Think-Pair-Share!

Sunday, September 13, 2015

Do you use the Think-Pair-Share engagement strategy in your classroom?  After posing a question, you tell students to think of an answer, turn to a nearby partner (pair), and students share and compare their responses. For me, the hardest part of this strategy is providing the appropriate amount of think time. In an effort to keep kids on-task and the lesson moving, I know that I often do not provide enough think time, especially for my ELLs.
Recently, I was scanning a book (Amazon affiliate link follows) called Total Participation Techniques: Making Every Student an Active Learner and was reminded of Quick Writes and Quick Draws! It was a light bulb moment for me... if I ask students to quickly write ideas or quickly draw an idea during their "think time", I would be more likely to give students the time they needed to process an answer to the question!  Here's a brief description of how each works along with an example:


Quick Writes
1.  The teacher poses a question or task.  How can weather affect our water and food supply? 

2.  Students are given a certain amount of time to jot down a response.  For the next three minutes, jot down your reflections on how weather can affect our water and food supply.  Most of the time, a list of phrases is fine with me.  In the book, the authors mention the option of writing a word bank of required words on the board (like "drought") so that students are required to interact with key vocabulary.

3.  When the 3 minutes have passed, instruct students to turn to a nearby classmate and share and compare their responses.


Quick Draws
I especially like to do these to review vocabulary words.

1.  The teacher poses a question or writes 1-3 vocabulary words on the board. reservoir, aqueduct, and drought

2.  Students are given a certain amount of time to draw or sketch something in a way that illustrates the meanings of the words.  Write these words in your notebook. For the next four minutes, draw quick sketches that illustrate the meanings of the words.

3.  When the 4 minutes have passed, instruct students to turn to a nearby classmate and share and compare their quick drawings.

Students generally enjoy these engaging activities... especially the Quick Draws.  An added benefit of using these strategies is that they can serve as a type of formative assessment or exit ticket!  You can monitor which students seem to be having difficulty with the task and/or which students show full understanding and which students show partial understanding.

Thanks for stopping by!  If you have time, head over to Upper Elementary Snapshots where I am blogging about a lesson I learned the hard way about teaching author's purpose to upper elementary students.  (It includes a couple freebies!)

Rounding with Number Lines

Sunday, August 30, 2015
It seems there are two schools of thought when it comes to teaching students to round numbers. When you search "rounding anchor charts" on Pinterest, a whole slew of cute little rhymes about "going next door" to the neighboring number appear. You can also find a plethora of images with a rounding roller coaster (which is what I used to teach rounding to my second graders long ago during my first two years of teaching).

Recently, though, I ran across a blog post by Beyond Traditional Math that made me rethink my approach to teaching students how to round numbers. In fact, the author convinced me that teaching students to use number lines to round numbers is the best approach for most children because it provides the necessary conceptual understanding to support long-term retention. Tricks are too easily forgotten, whereas the number line approach supports number sense and place value understanding. (Read the blog post HERE.)

Therefore, when I decided to create a Rounding PowerPoint last week, I used number lines. However, in an effort to make things just a bit more engaging, I added ninjas! These two posters (which can be downloaded by clicking on the images) and the anchor chart show the basic premise.

Use the number line to help upper elementary students understand the concept of rounding. Two free posters and a set of task cards are included in this blog post!

Use the number line to help upper elementary students understand the concept of rounding. Two free posters and a set of task cards are included in this blog post!

Use the number line to help upper elementary students understand the concept of rounding. Two free posters are included!

If you are interested in possibly using this approach to teach rounding this year, feel free to check out my rounding ninja resources. All of these rounding activities address rounding 2-, 3-, 4-, and 5-digit numbers to the nearest ten, hundred, and thousand.

Teach your students to round to the nearest ten, hundred, and thousand using the number line method. This engaging teaching resources uses ninjas to kick numbers up or down the number line!


Rounding with number lines craftivity for upper elementary students.


Use the number line to help upper elementary students understand the concept of rounding. Two free posters and a set of task cards are included in this blog post!


~Deb

Parts of Speech Craftivity... for FREE!!

Friday, August 7, 2015
I am just writing a super-short blog post today to share my revised FREE Adjective & Adverb craftivity!  In my experiences teaching upper elementary, students struggle with adjectives and adverbs... and understandably so.  They do have similar functions.  Students must have a solid understanding of nouns and verbs before they are able to reliably identify adjectives and adverbs.  Most of the time, students do fairly well identifying adjectives and adverbs in isolation (for example, many kids understand that "beautiful" is an adjective), but once you ask them to identify the part of speech of a certain word in a sentence, it suddenly becomes much more difficult for them!

And that's why I decided to create this FREE craftivity!  It gave my students another opportunity to identify adjectives and adverbs in sentences, yet it wasn't a "boring, old worksheet".  Plus, it makes a great fall wall display!  If you think you can use it with your students this year, please feel free to click on the photo and download it!
Check out this FREE Parts of Speech Craftivity!  Students identify whether the underlined word within each sentence is an adjective or an adverb, and then assemble the craftivity!


If you want to know more about the benefits of using craftivities in your classroom, check out either or both of the following blog posts:

Using Elements of Craftivities in Interactive Notebooks (this post contains another freebie!)

Fractions in Simplest Form... An Interactive Anchor Chart

Wednesday, July 22, 2015
Today, I am sharing my "Fractions in Simplest Form" anchor chart with you. As you can see, this is an interactive anchor chart in which I create the basic shell prior to math class, but the five example problems are worked out in the presence of my students (and with their help).
This shows how much of the anchor chart I create prior to class.

I model one row at a time, first enlisting students to help me list the factors for the numerator and the denominator, and then circling the greatest common factor.
 Next, we divide both the numerator and denominators by the GCF and we have written our fraction in simplest form!

When we have finished working through the fractions on the anchor chart, it looks like this:
Display an anchor chart to help your students remember how to simplify fractions to their simplest form!    

If you are looking for fraction resources, check out my store where I have created teaching fraction resources for 3rd grade, 4th grade, and 5th grade.  The introduction to calculating simplest form can be found in my fourth grade materials.  

fractions in simplest form


fractions in simplest form


As always, thanks for stopping by! Don't forget to click over to Upper Elementary Snapshots now!

~Deb

FREE Guided Reading Lesson Plans...Who Stole the Wizard of Oz?

Friday, June 26, 2015
I have always loved mysteries!  In fact, I read the entire series of 39 Trixie Belden mysteries when I was in upper elementary school.  I remember always feeling utterly perplexed as to how Trixie could ever possibly solve each mystery.  Once I started a Trixie Beldon book, I read it quite quickly because I just had  to find out who the guilty culprit was as soon as possible!   I remember feeling a sense of accomplishment along with Trixie when the pieces all fell together and the mystery was solved at the end of the book... and immediately wanting to start another book in the series.

My own love for mysteries is probably why I enjoy reading A to Z mysteries and Who Stole The Wizard of Oz? with students!  As a teacher, it is quite entertaining to read children's mysteries! When I read an A to Z mystery now, the trail of clues (and red herrings!) left by the author seem so obvious to my adult mind, but the students never seem to notice them. In my opinion, Who Stole The Wizard of Oz? by Avi is one of the best children's mysteries available, and is a must-read for students at that reading level.

Occasionally, I upload guided reading lesson plans I used during my tenure as an upper elementary reading teacher to my blog. Today is another one of those days! These plans aren't fancy- they are simply real-teaching Word-document lesson plans that I wrote back before I knew TeachersPayTeachers existed! They will likely need to be tweaked to meet the needs of your students and your school district's expectations, but they will hopefully at least give you a starting point in terms of questions and vocabulary words to highlight for each chapter!

Feel free to download them if you can use them! According to the Scholastic website, Who Stole The Wizard of Oz? is a Level P book with a Lexile Level of 520. (Amazon affiliate link follows.)


Click HERE for Word version.
Click HERE for PDF version.
Detective Image by Mel from Graphics From the Pond.  Background Paper by Sonya DeHart Design.
(If you'd like to see the other free guided reading lesson plans I have available, click on the links below.)
Shiloh (Level R)
Flat Stanley (Level M)
I, Amber Brown (Level N)
Chocolate Covered Ants (Level Q)

Do you have any other favorite mysteries you like to read with your students?

Author's Craft... Thinking About the Text

Monday, June 8, 2015

Within the text...   Beyond the Text...   About the Text...

When I began my two-year tenure as a Title 1 reading teacher a few years ago, these question categories by Fountas & Pinnell were new to me.  In case you are unfamiliar with these terms...

  • Within the Text  refers to those lower-level "right there" questions in which students can easily find the answer in the text. Two examples:  What was the main problem in the story?  How was the problem solved?
  • Beyond the Text  refers to those higher-level questions that often require students to use their own background knowledge to make inferences that aren't directly stated in the book. Two examples:  How did the main character change in the story? Why was ____ so unhappy about having to move?
  • About the Text  refers to those higher-level questions that are related to the craft of being an author- the types of things the author did to make the book interesting for the reader. Two examples: How does the author communicate a feeling of _____?  Explain the play on words on page ___.
As a teacher, I found it easy to ask questions that fit into the first two categories. However, that third category was considerably more difficult. Furthermore, this category was the one that most of my students frequently struggled with.

When I found this book, though, I was immediately inspired to turn it into an "Author's Craft" lesson where my students and I could discuss how the author "played with words" in an attempt to entertain the reader. (Well, I must admit... I didn't actually find it.  It was a book I had ordered several years before and had forgotten about until my daughter found it and brought it to me to read to her. As I was reading it, I realized that my 6-year-old daughter didn't understand any of the author's humor and plays on words.... but I thought that my fourth and fifth grade students would understand at least some of the author's humor.) (Amazon affiliate link follows.)



As I read the book to my students, I recorded our thoughts on an anchor chart. As you can see, I created three columns. In the first column, we recorded a "clever" sentence used by the author. In the next column, we recorded what it meant in the book (and whether it was an idiom). In the third column, we attempted to explain what made that sentence particularly clever and entertaining for the reader.
Studying Author's Craft using an read-aloud
This anchor chart shows a small fraction of the "clever sentences" in this book..  A reader could easily identify over 20 "plays on words" used by the author throughout this entire book

I have to be honest... the majority of my students struggled with this- especially at first. But after I explained several "clever sentences" at the beginning of the book, they seemed to be stretching their minds and looking for different ways that the reader could be entertained by various sentences. Better yet, when I revisited this concept later during small group guided reading lessons by asking questions like "Did you notice how the author used an idiom to add humor on this page?", students were often able to correctly identify the idiom and explain the author's word play.

The basic premise of the book is that a T-Rex is coming toward their town, so all of the inhabitants rush to leave. Here are a few of the pages:
"The jump ropes skipped town."

"The bananas split, peeled out, slipped away."

"The frogs hopped a train, and that train made tracks."

"The basketball players went traveling, while the baseball players struck out on their own."

"Good buy," said the shoppers.
"Buy, buy," said the shopkeepers.

If you're looking for some author's craft activities, feel free to check out my Author's Craft PowerPoint!
Introduce author's craft techniques to your students by using this PowerPoint. It focuses on voice, imagery, figurative language, sentence fluency, analogies, and interesting use of language!


Have a great week!

Powered by Blogger.
Back to Top