Adventures in Literacy Land: Reading Toward the Stars

Showing posts with label Reading Toward the Stars. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Reading Toward the Stars. Show all posts

The Research Paper Made Simple

Even young children can write simple research papers with an easy mentor text and model for writing.
Even our youngest students can write  simple research paper by using a fun and easy mentor text. The Important Book helps students write a simple research paper after doing some quick research.

When I help students write their first research paper, I love to use The Important Book  by Margaret Wise Brown. If you haven't seen this book, you really need to check it out! It has a simple way of telling about something that makes it easy for students to learn more about something and provides a great mentor text for helping students write in an easy way.
After reading the book aloud to them, I started out by modeling what I wanted them to research. I used a Tree Map to show them the information I found about horses. This also served as the information I wanted them to search for their research. I put a star next to the "important" fact and circled the other information I wanted to include.
Even our youngest students can write simple research paper by using a fun and easy mentor text. The Important Book helps students write a simple research paper after doing some quick research.

After I created my Tree Map, they chose their animals to research and researched to create their Tree Maps.

Even our youngest students can write simple research paper by using a fun and easy mentor text. The Important Book helps students write a simple research paper after doing some quick research.
They chose their important thing with a star and the others were circled.

Then I wrote my paragraph using the information and creating a model for them to use.
Even our youngest students can write simple research paper by using a fun and easy mentor text. The Important Book helps students write a simple research paper after doing some quick research.

They used my model to write a rough draft to edit and revise. Their final copy was complete with a picture at the top.
Even our youngest students can write simple research paper by using a fun and easy mentor text. The Important Book helps students write a simple research paper after doing some quick research.

Overall, these second graders learned a lot about some simple research to get them ready for third grade. They really enjoyed working on this and took great pride in it ~ something they all need!

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Even our youngest students can write simple research paper by using a fun and easy mentor text. The Important Book helps students write a simple research paper after doing some quick research.








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Happy 2nd Birthday, Literacy Land!


Can you believe that Literacy Land is officially 2 years old?

Me either!!  

This has been a fun ride, and I have made some good friends who have taught me so much about literacy and helping students learn.  I have really enjoyed sharing my passion for all things literacy with all of you, our readers.

In 2016, we plan to continue bringing you literacy ideas you can take straight to your classroom. 

So, join us all through January as we reacquaint you with our bloggers and introduce some new bloggers to Lit Land.  Make sure you stop by all month for tips, freebies, and a giveaway at the end!  You don't want to miss the fun!



Hello, everyone!  It's Andrea from Reading Toward the Stars.  

I love spending time working with my students to make it fun and engaging. Though I love all things literacy, my favorite aspect to work with is comprehension.  When I plan for comprehension activities, I like to find things that will make it concrete.  

Our school uses Thinking Maps to help students think about what they have read or will read.  This helps them to put their thoughts onto paper and make it all real.

Another way I make it concrete is by working through activities that make them move.  Students may put sticky notes on a chart and move them around.  They may make foldables to show what they are learning. 

 And we play games to make it real.  

More than anything, we have fun ~ tons of fun!  Students enjoy working with me and look forward to our time together.  The students don't even realize we are learning!  

Join us throughout 2016 as we bring you literacy tips, tricks, and timesavers!

Before you go, grab this freebie of summarizing templates that are perfect for making comprehension real!


And join us at the end of the month for a huge giveaway!  You won't want to miss it!






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A-Mazing Fun!


Hello, everyone!  It's Andrea from Reading Toward the Stars with a fun and easy trick for getting students to focus on reading letters and words.  I love using mazes to help them read various different things and focus on it.

A few years ago, I found this wonderful video from Teacher Tipster.  Have you seen him?  He has AMAZING and simple ideas that anyone can use!!  This one was so easy I used it that very day!  You simply take any maze, add words, letters, math problems, etc. to it.  Then the kids have to follow the path to the end.  If they get to a "dead end", they have to go back and read all of the words they went over {or whatever you have for them to do}.

Here is a video because he explains it soooo much better than I ever could!




Here are some examples I have used in the past.

 I put the letters in order in the correct places in the maze.  There are other letters in the maze at dead ends.  To get through the maze, the students must go in the correct order.

A finished maze!
 This maze has CVC words in it.  To get through the maze correctly, they need to follow the short a words.  Other CVC words are placed throughout the maze.
And we're there!
  The students LOVE these, and they are so easy to make.  Here are some sites with some good FREE mazes!  Or you could always use coloring books pages with them in it.

Krazy Dad ~ "books of mazes"
Mazes Online
Print Activities.com ~ Has letter mazes to print
All Kids Network ~ LOTS of FREE mazes!

Or just "Google" free mazes and see what you get ~ LOTS of free mazes!

Hope this is something fun your kids will enjoy too!  Any grade level would love this because you can get some really intricate mazes and put in vocabulary or math problems for the older crowd.  My third graders love when I make these for them too!  I love watching and listening to them work them out!







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Reading is Thinking!


Hello, all!  It's Andrea from Reading Toward the Stars with a little bit of thinking while reading for everyone!

At this point in the year, I spend a lot of time with my students working on thinking about what they are reading.  We do a lot of comprehension activities that include so many different hands on ways to get kids excited about reading.  We love using this thought bubble to show that we are thinking while we are reading.  You can read more about that on my blog in this {post}.

I read the book Ruby the Copycat to my third grade students, and they used it to tell us what they were thinking while I was reading.

In Ruby the Copycat, Ruby is the new girl in school.  She copies everything the girl in front of her does, resulting in a loss of friendship.  Then she copies her teacher, and her teacher makes it clear that she needs to be herself.

The next day they read books of their choice and wrote something they were thinking while they were reading.


 I love it because we filled up my "Reading is Thinking" bulletin board.  Here is what it looks like now that we have done some reading and thinking!

What fun it is to see what they were thinking while they were reading!  Some of them retold the story, while others told us something the characters could do to solve a problem.

I am linking this up with my own blog's Book Talk Thursday!  If you have good books to share, please feel free to link up anytime! It is open through much of November!
  









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Making Meaning of Main Idea

Hello, everyone!  It's Andrea from Reading Toward the Stars with an easy comprehension strategy for your students.

This year our school really needs to work on comprehension strategies to help our students understand what they are reading.  Not skills, but strategies!  Our students didn't score well on the reading or math assessments, so we are working hard to help those students become better readers.  Whatever we were doing before just wasn't working.

As the reading specialist, the teachers tell me what skills their students are lacking, and I work on the skills by giving the kids some strategies.  I love that our district uses Thinking Maps as a strategy to help students understand what they are reading or working through.

This week I have been working with my third grade group on finding the main idea of a fiction story and NOT retelling the story.  This is hard because kids want to tell you every single detail.  We have been reading this book from Mondo Publishing:  Edgar Badger's Balloon Day.

We have been reading chapter by chapter and focusing on the main idea or details.  Today we focused on both.  They read the third chapter of the book titled "The Wrong Day?"

After reading the chapter, we discussed the main idea and only the main idea.  This is tough for students.  They want to tell every.single.detail.  After talking about the main idea, we then listed some, not all, details to back up the main idea.

They wanted to give me every.single.detail again, but I helped them focus on what was important for the main idea.  This strategy helped them out so much, and the thinking map helped them to narrow down what was important information from the book.  Tomorrow, they are going to find the details for the chapter's main idea.  I hope this will help them as they think about what they are reading!

How do you help students focus on the main idea and details and NOT retell the entire story?




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Predictions Made Easy

Hello, everyone!  It's Andrea from Reading Toward the Stars to share an easy and fun way to help with comprehension at all grade levels!


Before I was a reading specialist, I spent 14 years teaching third and fourth graders.  I love teaching that age because they are really ready to learn and seem to soak it all in!  But, I know that many students struggle with reading comprehension.  Many times it is not an easy fix, but I spend all year with this one strategy to help my students.  And I still use it with my intervention groups.

Since I have worked with students in grades K-4 this year, I thought this would be great for my second and third grade students who really struggle with comprehension.  I used it with them with great success.  What is it?  Prediction!  I just teach the students to Stop, Think, Predict, which is a type of Directed Listening Thinking Activity (DLTA) or a Directed Reading Thinking Activity (DRTA)!  Here is how it works.

I chose a fun book to read that I hoped no one had read before.  The first book I read was a super easy and silly book Bark, George(Amazon affiliate link will take you to the books in this post.)

In the book, George does everything but bark for his mother until she takes them to the vet.  The book is perfect for predicting because the students have to think about what might happen next.  It is quick and easy, but the kids loved it!  This will even be perfect for kindergarten students!

After talking about the book and how we used predicting, I showed them another book Soccer Mom from Outer Space. In the book, Lena's father tells her about how his mother dressed like a pickle to cheer on his team, the Atomic Pickles.  He told her that he was embarrassed, so she went to a game without her costume.  What happened next, I will let you find out!
We spent some time just looking at the cover and predicting together, all along talking about how the kids feel when playing sports.  Then I handed out a chart with four boxes for the students to stop at certain points to make predictions while I read the book.  I asked them to stop and make a prediction about what might happen next, not at the end of the book.  Here is an example.  {Ignore the misspellings from my wonderful struggling reader and speller.}
I loved hearing some of the predictions they made.  Some of them were really close too!  So fun!

I thought this would also be great for a literacy center.  I made some bookmarks that can be placed throughout a book for students to read and then write their predictions on the predictions chart.  I actually handed the bookmarks out to my students to use while they read to help them remember to Stop, Think, Predict! Click {here} or on the picture below to grab it for free!

I love using various read-alouds and then releasing it to the students through guided reading and then into independent reading, especially with struggling readers.  This helps to scaffold their learning, leading to independence in reading and predicting.  With that independence, they will become lifelong readers!

So, what do you do to help students with predicting while they read?




http://readingtowardthestars.com

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