Tried and True: Literacy Activities I Love

What a week! After a relatively cool summer, Pennsylvania enjoyed (?) some hot and humid temperatures this week. I used old-fashioned heat management strategies like closing my blinds at 10 and starting fans early in the morning to pull in cool air. These strategies kept the temperature in my room to a manageable 86 degrees. The kids were amazing about it and never complained.

One of the nicest parts of my week was going back to some tried and true activities that should be part of every literacy teacher's repertoire of techniques. Even in the heat, these activities were engaging and fun for everyone involved.

Making Big Words

I first saw the Making Big Words activity back when I was doing my first round of graduate classes, and I started using it in middle school immediately. It is one of those rare activities that fits every ability level.

Kids get a strip of letter tiles arranged with vowels first in alphabetical order. This week's letters were:

e e i o o c h m n n p r s

The teacher gives clues about words that can be made with those letters, and kids arrange the letters to make the words. At the end, the students try to build the big word that can be formed with all of the letters. Can you figure out this week's big word?*

What I love is that it gives me instant information about how kids approach words and word-making. Every student in fourth grade used the same set of letter tiles this week, but as they were divided into our intervention groups we could see how each group dealt with the challenges. For example, students in the ESL group struggled with changing shop to shoe because of the odd spelling pattern in shoe. In my grade level group, I saw many different spellings of poison--poisen, posion--which shows me that unaccented final syllables are a topic to explore.

It is a fabulous activity to get to know a new group of students and get real-time information on how they are processing and working with words.

You can read my ancient review of Making More Big Words at Amazon--a relic from before I started blogging!

Retelling with Figures

When students have trouble comprehending a text, retelling with figures is my go-to plan. The idea grew from my days as a preschool teacher, when I used felt figures to tell stories. (Remember feltboards? Does anyone use them anymore?) With older students, having figures to retell the events in a story helps them to attach meaning to the events. Students have a visual cue for retelling and have fun manipulating the figures.

This picture from last year shows students using retelling figures
to retell key ideas from an expository text. 

This week, students in one of my reading classes read "Clever Coyote" and then retold the story using four pictures: a coyote, a mouse, a rock, and a rattlesnake. Watching them retell in pairs helped me to see how they were comprehending the events of the story. This story worked especially well because the plot hinges on the locations of the characters.

You can read more about retelling with figures at this blog post. I have some sets of retelling figures and stories available in Analyzing Story Elements (Gwen and the Witch) and Summarizing Stories (The Magic Key).

Settling into our literacy routines has become so meaningful and enriching. Even though I have done these activities many time before, I always love seeing how new students engage with them. What are your tried and true activities that you return to, year after year?

*comprehension

Reading Assessments for the Start of the Year

     Another school year has begun! At the start of the year I am always eager to find out as much about my new readers as I can. I know that I need to hit the ground running if I want to move my readers and help them grow. At the same time, I don't want to burden kids with too many assessments. My goal is to keep things light and fun.

The Read-Aloud Test
    This is as easy as it gets. Read aloud an an interesting text with very few pictures. Watch how kids react.

    It's that simple! Well--not really. The book selection is the key part. With one group of readers I'm reading aloud Tollins: Explosive Tales for Children. If you have never met the Tollins, this book is well worth it. It has a very dry, British feel to the humor and is wonderful for helping me gauge the reactions of my readers. Which kids are laughing? Which are staring at the wall? Which readers look shocked at the treatment of fairies?
    In my other class I am reading aloud Toys Go Out. I've written about this book before, and I still love starting with it. This book is excellent for helping students to understand how readers build mental models. (It's funny, too.)

"What was the last book that you read that you liked?"
    I ask this question as I am trying to match books to readers in the first few days of reading class. Sometimes kids speak confidently about books and series. Sometimes they will describe a book that will help me to choose the next book to give them. And sometimes they will look at the floor and mumble a bit. Each of these is an important thing for me to know about a reader! By watching how readers interact with books, I can get a good sense in the first few days of which readers will need more targeted help.

Visualizing Assessment
    Fourth graders are good at using picture clues. So good, in fact, that I really need to pull away picture clues early on to see what they can do with simple text. A visualizing assessment is a wonderful tool for this.
    I tell readers: "I really want to know what is going on in your head as you read. Because I can't see inside, I'd like to you to do your best to draw a picture of what you visualize as you read. It doesn't have to be perfect, and I'm not looking at your artwork, so feel free to add labels if you want to."

Visualizing Passages and Assessments 

   
 Another visualizing assessment in my book The Forest and the Trees: Helping Readers Identify Details in Texts and Tests. I've found that it's helpful to have several different versions to use throughout the year.

QRI Word Reading
    I learn so much about readers when I administer the QRI (Qualitative Reading Inventory). In the first few frantic days of school, I don't really have time to sit down and give a QRI my full attention. But I can give the first part of the assessment--the word reading part! This gives me some very early information that I can use to help students with book selection, and helps me to pull the right selections to use with students.
    I never do the QRI with all students. However, it's very helpful for students who seem to be struggling or seem to reading well above grade level. I love to sit down and really listen to these students read.

These quick assessments help me to find out some basic information about the readers in my room, early in the school year. They help to get me through the first few weeks of slow going as we look at routines and procedures. These assessments are a nice balance to my other main job of the first few weeks--getting books to readers! What assessments do you like to use early in the school year?

Back to School Books

This year, I have resolved to step away from the fancy border. Instead of buying beautiful classroom supplies or trying to make everything match, I'm buying more books...

...and not just any books. I live in an area with few bookstores, so my book purchases tend to focus on the ones that kids can't pick up at a big box store. I'm also trying to enlarge my graphic novel collection. So here are the books that I've bought in the last two weeks, or am planning to buy!

Fairy Tale Comics


I read a local library copy of this last year, so I was thrilled to find a copy of it in a comics bookstore at the beach. I just love to buy books in the real world, and a comics bookstore that has a selection of children's graphic novels is about the best thing ever.

I think that this book will take the title of the First Read-Aloud of the Year. Projected on the whiteboard, it will be the perfect tool for showing students how to interact with a graphic novel. Plus the short story format will be perfect for short reading sessions throughout the day...I think I'll call on kids to choose which story to read next from the Table of Contents.

Ubiquitous and Dark Emperor by Joyce Sidman

I discovered these at a local store called Ollie's. Of course after my husband and I went out to dinner for our anniversary I wanted to go and browse for books. Now Ollie's may not look like a place to discover books (it is a store of overstocks), but they have a surprisingly nice selection.

These books include beautiful poems alongside illustrations and informational text. They will be perfect additions to my poetry collections. I think that I'll make a poster of "Night-Spider's Advice" from Dark Emperor because the poem is such a neat example of how a reader can extract double meanings from a poem.  But I also plan to read the poems aloud in the first weeks of school...again, letting kids choose which poems to hear.

Amulet #6 by Kazu Kibuishi

Last year we bought the Amulet series for my youngest son for his birthday. As you may remember, he went through a period as an acquisitional reader, when he just wanted to collect books but didn't really read them. Well, luckily the Bad Kitty series changed that, and he started to take off as a reader. I found Amulet as a next step for him.

The Amulet books were too good to keep at home, and while the kids know that most of their books usually end up in a classroom, I just couldn't appropriate a birthday present! Deep in the bowels of the Scholastic book clubs I found the whole set for bonus points, and they were worth every single one. I don't think I've ever had a series of books that found such a diverse group of readers. In fact, one of the most constantly asked questions was, "Who has Amulet #___?" (Runners-up were "Where is the tape?" and "Has anyone seen my coffee?")

"I'll see you on August 26," one of the most devoted Amulet fans said last year. "We'll be in school then, right? I'll come to your classroom so I can borrow the new book."

Hmm, I think I'd better get two copies of this one.

Zita the Spacegirl, Legends of Zita the Spacegirl, Return of Zita the Spacegirl by Ben Hatke

Like Amulet, Zita the Spacegirl has found a wide audience. I had it all year round and it was in pretty much constant demand. It has appeal for both girls and boys, which I really like. For some reason I didn't order the second and third in the series last year.

Over the summer I ordered the third (by mistake, instead of the second!) and took it on vacation. I thought that my youngest son had already read the first--but he hadn't! He went on and read the third, but hasn't really forgiven me for the mistake. Oh well.

I'm hoping to redeem myself by buying the second in the Zita series as well as Ben Hatke's new book, Julia's House for Lost Creatures. (You can see some gorgeous artwork from the book in this post at Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast.)

In the long run, these books will be much better purchases than any kind of fancy border or cool organizational tool. What books are on your list for the start of the year?

Starting the year with Artist Trading Cards...

   Each summer I wonder what kind of task to send along in the welcome letter for students. I like tasks that are inviting, that give an impression of what we will do together in the coming year without being too cumbersome or daunting.

   Last summer we sent Squiggles, which were fun. Each student received a squiggle, which they could decorate as they wished. The students brought their squiggle drawings to school on the first day to share. We loved seeing how the students all took the same beginning shapes and created imaginative designs!

   At the end of this school year, our art teacher organized an Artist Trading Card session for the last day of school. Students had been making cards all year, and each had a handful to share. Caught up in the usual end-of-year flurry, I only made three. Of course the kids all wanted to trade with me and I didn't have enough to trade with everyone.

  This year, then, we decided to start with the trading cards! Each student will get two blank cards in the welcome to school letter. I've been spending summer days doodling away on cards to send along in each envelope. Each student will get one completed card and two blanks, all for trading (or not) on the first day of school.

    It hasn't been as daunting a task as I thought. In fact, the cards are the perfect size for quick doodles and experiments, and have given me a purpose for trying out techniques and looking at my garden in a new way.

   Daylilies are fun:

 Last year's students all liked the fountain doodle, so I've made a few variations. This is a very old style for me, first perfected around the notes from my tenth grade World History class.

 
Yesterday a new image crept into my drawing. Oh, no! What is this? Fall leaves? An impossible schoolhouse?

   Oh, well. Fall can't come too soon--I still have 20+ cards to make.

Notes
-Have you tried Frolyc yet? I have lots of my texts posted there. It's an easy way to quickly publish content to student iPads.
-If you also have September on your mind, you may want to go ahead and check out my September reading homework packets. Four high-interest texts with parent-friendly directions, comprehension questions, and vocabulary activities.
-Teaching About Theme is a great set of activities for the beginning of the year. Multi-level stories and activities are all focused on the topic of theme.
-I've made several revisions to my pack Text-Based Inferences and More. Included is an interactive PowerPoint modeling the inference making process, assessments, and the kid-friendly Max Mission passages.

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