New Book to Love!!

Well, we just finished reading the book STONE FOX, by John Reynolds Gardiner! It was amazing! The children loved it and we all felt compelled to read on and on. We finished it in only 2 days, all 9 chapters!!! The book is a very easy read, suspensful, and even a tear-jerker! (Well, at least I was boo-hooing at the end!)

I don't want to say too much so you can check out this great story about a 10 year-old boy who needs to save his sick grandfather and the family farm all by himself.

Parents, why not read it again with your child! I'm sure they'd love to share it with you!

Testing Strategy

Well, every week now we have been taking a "cold" reading assessment. "Cold" means it is a test on a passage or story the students have not read or worked with before. The following are some tips/strategies that we have discussed in class to help us perform better on these tests:

1- Just know that the writer is out to trick you! He or she wants to know if you are a serious reader. (We already know you are smart!) That is why we read every single answer choice, to make sure we choose the BEST choice.

2- Read EVERYTHING!!! Including the directions, questions, captions, side-bars...

3- Go back into the text for EVERY question. 99% of the time there is direct evidence in the text to support a correct answer. At this grade level, there are many that come straight-forward from the text.

4- When we read a question, decide on what the key words are or event is then go and find those words/event in the text.

5- Once you find the section the question is refering to, READ AROUND REAL CAREFUL- that means, a little before and a little bit after to make sure we don't miss anything.

6- Pay attention to words in a CAPITALS and that are bolded.

7- If we need to figure out what a word means or what word means the same as one in the text, we should use the "Plug it in, Plug it in" strategy. That means that we should "plug in" all the possible answer choices into the text to see which makes the most sense.

8- Always do your BEST, and don't "poop" out! Work just as strong on the end as you did in on the beginning. (It is a common pattern for students to miss more questions at the end of a test, because they got tired reading the end of the passage and/or of answering the questions.)

Remember- Friday is test day! Believe in yourself!

Fluency Lesson

Today my students each put together two small booklets about school. They highlighted all of the end punctuation (. ! ?) and the commas. We later had a lesson on reading with fluency, which means reading "smooth and straight" with no "bumps and lumps."
One very important thing a reader does to accomplish reading a text fluently is to pay attention to the end punctuation and the commas. The author puts them there for the reader. I modeled reading part of The Very Hungry Caterpillar, by Eric Carle, without any attention to punctuation. The students quickly noticed that without any punctuation the reader couldn't breathe correctly, it was very fast, and hard to understand. I then modeled reading with too much punctuation at incorrect points. They noticed the choppiness of the text and, again, the increased difficulty in understanding.
To emphasize the end punctuation and commas I set up a "snapping beat" system. Any end punctuation gets two snaps/beats and a comma gets only one snap/beat.
Following the pattern of modeling and then group practicing, we read half of Carle's book and also the two little booklets they created inputting the snapping beats as the text required.
Students are expected to learn to read the two little books fluently, with attention to punctuation, by Friday. This means that they should be doing repeated readings of these short texts at home. Students can also use this strategy while reading their regular books.