Halloween Poetry Jottings

When Halloween falls on a weekday, teachers need to embrace it in order to make it through a successful day of learning! I took a break from our current unit, Following Characters into Meaning. Instead of reading from our unit read aloud Because of Winn Dixie, I used some holiday poems to keep students focused. They thought it was cool to stop doing Reading Workshop (they just didn't realize they were still doing it)! When you teach like a pirate, sometimes you have to hook students by letting them think they are getting away with something. If they want to think they aren't doing work because the activity is new and different, then by all means I will run with it! 

 

I selected a variety of poems: repetitive, acrostic, rhyming, free verse, musical lyrics, haiku. I chose poems that I thought fit the category of complex text. The poems had strong vocabulary, allowed students to practice oral reading fluency, contained literal and figurative language, and lead students to envision. 

 

Students read the poems with their reading partner. They made jottings focused on empathy, envisioning, and predictions.

 

 

Students placed their jottings on the back of the poems so that I can use these jottings to conference with them next week.

How Can You Assess Jottings?

My school district uses a percentage value to determine grades.  My literacy teammate and I had to spend some time at the end of the Lucy Calkins Unit 2: Following Characters Into Meaning deciding how we would assess our students.  In the past we would give a common assessment comprised of a few passages with some comprehension questions at the end. They would receive a grade based on how many questions they got right. But within a balanced literacy framework our assessments would need to change. We had to ask, "how do we assess the students at their own levels using jottings we have been using throughout this unit?"

This is what we came up with as our Jottings Assessment:

We chose fiction passages that had strong characters.  We chose a 1st grade passage, 2nd grade passage, 3rd grade passage, and 4th grade passage to reflect our students' reading levels. The passages are from HaveFunTeaching.com (next time though we plan to use the leveled passages from The Teacher's College Reading and Writing Project which we learned about after the assessment). Reading A to Z is also another good site to get leveled passages.

On the back of each passage was a sticky note labeled with the four strategies and skills the students had been using in their jottings during their fiction reading--envision, empathy, predicting, character traits. Each student read two passages and responded by writing their jottings on the sticky note templates.

 

Even my 3rd grade student who is at a Guided Reading Level A was able to be assessed. He dictated his responses to a scribe. My nonverbal student with cerebral palsey listened to her passage and pointed to picture responses that were recorded.

We created a rubric using Rubistar to score the students' jottings with a point value giving us our required percentage grade. Click here to download the rubric. We saved the entire assessment into student folders so that we could use them as talking points during parent conferences. The students really enjoyed the assessment. Afterwards they said it didn't seem like a test because they were just reading and jotting like always!

Fancy Sticky Notes

I am so excited to use these new sticky notes this week!  I found them at Family Dollar...only $1 for a pack of 3, so I stocked up! I think they will fit perfectly with our character jottings. The heart ones can be used for empathy jottings.  The t-shirt sticky notes can be used to record character traits or envisioning.  The arrows can be used for making predictions and they can point towards the details in the text that support the predictions. 

The jottings parking lot after Block I...the new stickies were a hit!

nice use of empathy

didn't use the heart for empathy, but great character description

she included the empathy label

more empathy...I think the fancy sticky notes are a winner

she'll need a little discussion on irregular verbs

this student is physically disabled with no verbal communication, but she still makes jottings with her aide writing as she points to facial expression pictures that demonstrate character traits

envisioning and character traits

character traits and empathy

empathy and envisioning

I found these sticky notes at Dollar Tree.  I am going to introduce them during our nonfiction study.

 

My lowest reader (level A) uses the skinny, pointed sticky note tabs to mark his pages when he wants to talk about that part in book clubs.

 

My students started using their sticky notes during Writing Workshop as well. This student revised the first sentence of a writing piece by writing a new beginning on her sticky note.

Sharing is Caring

Teaching is a wonderful profession because not only do we get to teach children new skills, but we have THE best network of collaboration between professionals.  I have to give some love to a wonderful wiki that has provided my students with terrific learning activities.

http://thirdgrade.okaloosaschools.wikispaces.net/Reading+Resources

I stumbled across this website while looking for some new comprehension activities for my students. What I discovered was many new literacy center opportunities just waiting to be made! Now that my student teacher has taken over my first block literacy class full-time, I actually have the luxury of spending time creating some new centers for my afternoon literacy block. 

These are easy centers to make and do not require you to buy anything special. Most of the centers are laminated construction paper (or paint sample cards) with questions and answers that are linked together with a binder ring that I hang on the wall with either a pushpin or a clothespin hotglued to the wall. My independent readers work on them with a partner, while my strategic readers work with a small group or they complete the cards with me during Guided Reading.