Roadmapping

During our test prep unit, students learned how to create roapmaps on passages as a way to reflect their thinking as they read. They learned that roadmapping was a way of being active readers. Their roadmaps would help them to better understand what they were reading.  Lucy Calkins recommends starting a grade level below to teach the strategy so that students feel successful. I began by using  lexile passages from the end of second grade.

 

I told my students that learning how to roadmap was like learning how to ride a bike with training wheels. I would show them how to do it and they would practice on the same passage. As they get better, they will practice on their own passages. I will help them until they can do it on their own.
 



 

This student color-coded what the different characters did in the story.

 



 

This student listed character traits along with text evidence.

He also identified a cause/effect relationship.

 

This student summarized at the end.

 

This student used the boxes and bullets strategy.

 

This student drew an actual road map to organize her thoughts.

 

Read Aloud Prep for Narrative Nonfiction

As I prepared for my read aloud during the new unit featuring narrative nonfiction, I came across a book I bought at a Scholastic warehouse sale--Rosa by Nikki Giovanni. Great author, Caldecott Honor Book, Coretta Scott King Award Winner, complex text (Fountas and Pinnell Level T)--seemed like a great pick to me!

I read the book and created my jottings to share with students based on my teaching points in the unit. These jottings were written on blue sticky notes. Then I read it again and created green sticky note tabs to mark relationships in the book because my students have been struggling with sequential events, cause/effect, and inferencing.

This book is informative and interesting. I never knew that the buses had a separate entrance in the back, that Rosa was actually sitting in the neutral area of the bus, or that people across the country sent shoes and jackets to the boycotters since they had to walk everywhere.

 

Rumplestiltskin may be an unfamiliar tale to some of my students so I may need to do a quick retell.

Card Games

Once again my trusty (colorful) paint sample cards come in handy. I am sure I am responsible for the badly predicted paint sales at Lowes and Walmart.  They just can't figure out how so many people get samples, but no gallons of paint are ever sold.  I hope it is not illegal to take these--but they are free, right?  Besides that I always take the colors that are the fullest because I think that those are the colors people would never use to paint the rooms in their houses.

These activities came from a variety of online sources over several years so I am sorry I do not have links to them.  Some of the are from FCRR and some are from the Third Grade Wiki.  Many of them I found simply by typing the topic into Google.  A googling tip that works well for me is to enter the topic and them add pdf.  That way I know I am not getting useless links.  Adding pdf usually outputs an activity rather than an article or lesson plan.

Author's Purpose

The cards have scenarios on them and students have to sort them based on the author's purpose. The correct answers are written on the back of the cards so that students can self-check.

For another center that features author's purpose check out Beanbag Toss

Cause and Effect

In this first activity, the students have to sort the cards to create a cause and effect relationship. The second activity is a little lower in level because there are choices to complete the cause-effect relationship rather than students creating their own. I only used one linking word, but you can also add in others to increase the complexity.

Fact and Opinion

In both activities students read a statement on the card and decide if it is a fact or an opinion.  In the activity on the left the cards are sorted and in the activity on the right the students give oral responses. 

Both sets of cards are coded on the back with the correct answers.

Synonyms and Antonyms

These card games are differentiated by reading ability. The first one is a higher level because the vocabulary is more academic than conversational.  The second activity, Dominoes, is more rigorous because it requires students to think ahead and anticipate future responses when linking the synonyms and antonyms together. The last two sets of cards are the same matching activity, but one set of cards has picture cues and one doesn't.