Daily Archives: May 4, 2011
Things to write about anchor chart
I know this is sort of bare, but here is my anchor chart for our little writing mini-lesson that I did today when I tried out the Daily 5.
During my 2nd class (which right now is 14 boys) I actually had about 4 of them that did Work on Writing and the rest did Read to Self. One of my boys had brought a small journal to school today where he had taped about 5 or 6 green 4 leaf clovers (1 on each page). He had found them in his yard this past weekend. He wrote about the luck that you receive from a 4 leaf clover on one of the pages-TOO DARLING! 
Literary Letter Anchor Chart
I finally got the anchor chart made for guiding my students in writing their literary letters-here it is.
I’ll post later on whether or not this anchor chart helped them dig deeper into their books and use higher level thinking while reading and writing their literary letters to me! I sure hope so!!
Daily 5 Trial Run
My little 6th graders are such guinea pigs this year. It’s my 1st year in 6th grade after 6 years in Kindergarten so I am constantly “trying out new things”. Today’s new thing was the Daily 5. It went really well!! And I still got in the reading program-just not as much of it as in the past! I have already decided that our Reading Street weekly unit/story is going to be stretched out to 2 weeks instead of 1 week-that way I can fit in all the other stuff I think the kids need! I am only going to do 2 rounds of Daily 5 each day and the sharing part didn’t happen today-we’ll see if I can squeeze it in after we get in our routine.
This is what our day looked like today:
1. Partner read weekly poem-locate the conjunctions in the poem since conjunctions are what we are studying in English this week
2. Read Aloud-I am reading a novel to them, and we are interacting with the novel-discussing, etc.
3. Practice 5 high frequency words-I need to get back into the spelling or some type of word study, but I really feel like my kids NEED some focus on these “No Excuse” words!
4. English-conjunctions-workbook page
5. Scott Foresman Reading Street-today we only read 1 page of the story but we really interacted with it. We
a. Choral read a paragraph. They worked in groups to determine the most important thing from the paragraph and we shared.
b. Each group choral read 1 paragraph with me. We stopped along the way and talked about comparing and contrasting both cities, Athens and Sparta.
6. Writing mini-lesson-this was VERY mini today because I also took time to explain the Daily 5 to them. The writing mini-lesson consisted of telling them things they could write about(very general) and the types of writing they could do.
7. Round 1 of Daily 5-I pulled several groups and we read/discussed the weekly poem again
8. Reading mini-lesson-We went over our “literary letter” requirements
9. 2nd round of Daily 5-I pulled a couple of more groups and still worked on the weekly poem-mainly visualization(This was easy peasy with this poem-The Vampire).
I LOVE working with small groups-they participate and interact so much more freely!!!!!! I can’t wait to get started with individual conferring, but I’m just not quite sure how to get this started and really what to do! I might just do the small groups this week and begin the conferring part next week.
Also, when I give the Reading, English, Spelling assessments on Thursday and Friday, I’m not sure how much they will throw us off schedule-we’ll see!!!!!!
Here is the little anchor chart I made for the Daily 5 choices(until I can make something better).
How to Read Aloud
I only wish that I had been reading aloud to my 6th graders ALL year EVERY day! I love it, they love it, and I just wonder if it would have helped them with their own reading aloud. I am only on the 3rd novel with them: 1st was How to Eat Fried Worms; 2nd was Walk Two Moons; now I am reading The Westing Game. My goal for next year is to read 1 chapter each day for the entire 180 days. Of course, next year I am also going to begin doing reading and writing mini-lessons so I will also be reading picture books, articles, excerpts from novels, etc to them a lot. I know that I will only be able to add maybe 1 more novel (complete novel) to the mix because of time constraints, and I’m wondering which one I am going to choose. The 1st one this year was FUNNY, the 2nd one was SAD, and the 3rd one is a MYSTERY(and it is very hard for them to follow!!).
I am thinking about adding one of these: Freak the Mighty, Maniac Magee, Number the Stars, something that makes them feel and think and wonder!
Anyway, I consider myself a very good reader in all sorts of ways-especially reading aloud. I have always been an avid reader of books (I LOVE TO READ). I taught Kindergarten for 6 years so I read aloud A LOT! And my 6th graders love the read aloud! So I found these tips on reading aloud and making it magical on Mem Fox‘s website. Read and listen for yourself!
