Reading Round Up: Starting the Year

Oh my goodness, this was my first proper back to school in three years! I moved from fourth grade to sixth grade at the end of 2015, which meant that I had two years with super-easy starts, as I'd taught the students before.

Getting Started with Assessments
So this August I was back to square one with a new crop of readers and writers. True to my reading specialist training I've been using the Qualitative Reading Inventory to listen to my students and gain an insight into their word-solving and comprehension techniques. There are so many things to like about this as a quick reading assessment--the word lists help me to see where kids are with words in isolation, while the passages allow me to listen to students and gain insight into their answers to both explicit and implicit questions. I've been working with one students each day, during independent reading time, and this has worked well.

Popular Books
It's been interesting to see how readers have taken to my classroom library. I always love seeing
which books they love! What's great about having so many excellent books around the classroom is that I can quickly pull them to explain concepts that I'm teaching.

  Calamity Jack by Shannon and Dean Hale retains so much appeal for students. This is one book that hasn't seen the shelf (actually, the bin dedicated to Shannon Hale's books) all year. What's neat about this book is that it leads to so many others--not just the Shannon Hale books, but also books by Nathan Hale.

Another popular graphic novel has been The Nameless City by Faith Erin Hicks. The characters are interesting, the setting is new and exciting, and the action appeals to a wide cross section of readers. Today a student even brought me the sequel, The Stone Heart, to show me the way it reveals a flashback in the text.

With a movie on the way, Wonder has been making its rounds through the room. It's so great to have this book at hand to illustrate important concepts about point of view. There are so many reasons to love this book, but Auggie's wry sarcasm is my favorite part.

New on TpT
I made these Expository Text Structure signs for my classroom. They're pretty simple, but a nice ongoing reference for my students.

I'm starting the year teaching about Earth's Spheres, so I'm using this set of resources that I made last year. They go very nicely with the Crash Course Kids videos on the topic.

These Summary and Analysis sets are easy to use for ongoing summarizing and text-based essays! I use them on a two-week basis (we're doing the Stormwater text right now) and see so much growth from my students over the course of the year.