Content Category: Choice Literacy
Results
Questioning Within Read Alouds
Throughout the year, I have been studying and implementing strategies to increase the quantity and the quality of the questions students ask within their classrooms. In the past, I have...
Leveraging Read Aloud
Nobody has ever told the language arts teachers at my middle school to stop reading aloud to students, but administrators have questioned us about the practice. As a result of...
End-of-Year Read Alouds
As we gather in our last community circle of the year, I pull out I Wish You More by Amy Krouse Rosenthal and read it to my attentive and quiet...
The Big Fresh February 24, 2018 Failure and Feedback
No matter how tough, no matter what kind of outside pressure, no matter how many bad breaks along the way, I must keep my sights on the final goal, to...
Building Stronger Wordsmiths
Relative location, longitude, scale, prime meridian, cardinal directions. What do all these terms have in common? These words and several more will be the focus of an upcoming fifth-grade social...
Conferring in First Grade: Focus on Goals and Strengths
Katrina Edwards confers with first grader Wyatt about his goal of increasing the volume of his reading, helping him self-assess what's going well and what lies ahead.
Meaningful Data
As I write this, I am in the season of becoming a runner again. Running is not something that is natural for me—either in inclination or ability. It is also...
Asking Students to Grade Themselves
During a recent field hockey game, my daughter, who is a senior on the team, was constantly on the receiving end of the referee’s whistle. “What was I doing?” she...
Leveraging Reading Assessment Benchmarks
As any primary or upper elementary teacher of reading workshop knows, reading benchmark assessments is incredibly time-consuming, often taking us away from precious conferring time. The importance of administering them...
The Big Fresh February 17, 2018 Memory Box
Humans, not places, make memories. Ama Ata Aidoo On a cold winter day, I stopped at the grocery store on the way to school and bought a large tub of...
An Editing Strategy for Run-On Sentences
Yesterday, we pulled up next to Teddy to confer about the memoir he was writing. Teddy struggles with expressing himself in writing. He typically uses simple sentence structure and has...
Students Watching Teachers
Every few weeks, we have a teachers' meeting or professional development before school starts. I do everything I can to make sure teachers are out of the meeting and back...
Big Question Minilesson
Katherine Sokolowski models how readers make choices as questions arise while reading independently, and demonstrates how she moves between a novel and Web resources.
Writing Workshop Bingo
On a warm afternoon, with windows open and a refreshing breeze circulating through the room, Jared raised his hand in the middle of our minilesson on how to craft a...
Bulletin Board of Independence
One of my favorite questions to ask students when I am working with them in their classrooms is about the tools they use. They often tell me bulletin boards with...
The Big Fresh February 10, 2018 Again and Again
Repetition is the mother of skill. Anthony Robbins If you’re a teacher, you’ll relate to this experience: If you teach a lesson or unit two times, you get twice as...
One Text, Many Lessons
During our prep for state testing, Alex wrote lead after lead in her on-demand narrative pieces that mimicked the structure and phrasing of Owl Moon. She knew the lead to...
Keeping Minilessons Short
Ten minutes go by fast when I’m doing a minilesson. Therefore, I’m always excited when I come up with a strategy that gets students off the rug and to their...
The Importance of Context Minilesson
Christy Rush-Levine shares a vivid anecdote with her middle school students to highlight the importance of context in literary analysis.
The Big Fresh February 3, 2018 When Your Car Is Your Teacher
It is what you don't expect . . . that most needs looking for. Neal Stephenson My husband Dave was happily driving our new car home from the dealership. We...
Close Attention and Reading Response: Conferring with Tori
Christy confers with eighth grader Tori about her reading response to Why We Broke Up. She encourages Tori to make connections between the characters in her current book and her...
