Most of you know that I am working on my small groups this semester. I've been focusing on my reading group for the past few weeks. (I have plans to work on math groups, but we haven't had a full week of school since we've been back. It's not looking good for this to be a full week either.) This week I didn't get my plans written out and I'm not sure it's made much of a difference. This week's theme in reading is birds. My kids are very interested in birds and animals in general. We use the Treasures reading series. I usually use the leveled readers that came with the series for my groups for the first part of the week. One group read a story called "Amazing Birds." They took the book home Monday and then Tuesday we read the book together I had them tell me some things they learned from the book before we read it. As we were reading the book, I realized it would be a good book to work on pulling facts from the book. So I made a table for the kids to pick three birds and then write 2 facts. I meant to take a picture of this group, but I didn't think about it until it was too late. The next group read a book about penguins. I can't remember what it was called now. But for this group I made a circle map for them to pull 4 facts from the book. I was so proud of these kids. These 3 students are ELL students and they did a great job pulling the facts from the story. By this time, I had remembered to take some pictures.
I am really pleased with how well this went. I still need to work more on meeting with my groups and doing some word work with them. But I think I'm making progress with my goal of improving my group instruction. I have one group where they are all reading on at least a 2nd grade level. I haven't really been sure what to do with them. I don't have but a couple of sets of chapter books where I have more than 2 copies of. So the four students are reading different books. They read a chapter at home each night and then we work on different comprehension skills. One day we worked on character because they were all reading Junie B. Jones. This week we worked on text to self connections and then tomorrow they are suppose to summarize what they have read so far. I try to check in with this group even when I don't actually meet with them. They tell me what chapter they are on and I try to tell them what skill I want them to focus on. My groups aren't perfect but they are progress. I have the graphic organizers as a freebie if you are interested. They are pretty simple but they did the trick.
(Click here)
Let me know if you find these useful. I love it when people can use what I create for my class.
I'm working on starting reading notebooks with my kids. Then they have a place to respond to the different books and stories we read in class. Today we used the story map from my
Monster Mapping for Stories product. I copy these 2 to a page so they fit perfectly in a composition book. Once I get these going, I'll blog about them.
The last thing I wanted to share was about my Sweet Hubby. He's a veterinarian and since we're studying about birds this week, he brought a few animals in. He brought the clinic cat, Martha, an Indian ring neck parakeet, Beaker, and a Moluccan Cockatoo, Zachary. The kids loved it. I am lucky that Chris enjoys doing stuff like this and he's great with kids. Here's a couple of pictures from today.
I hope you're staying safe if you are in the areas of thunderstorms and tornadoes. We're experiencing a lot of flooding. I was hoping for a five day week this week but it could be iffy if the rain continues.
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