Reading for Intermediate and Advanced Learners, Fall, 2011

Read/Write /Think has many lessons and tools which teachers need to be aware of so they can use them in their curriculum. I looked at a lesson about paraphrasing. I like how this website already gives the NTE/IRA standards about readers needing to be able to interpret a clear understanding of print and nonprint information. In this lesson the teacher gives the resources of using whiteboards and internet. She focuses her lesson on animals. This could be changed on anything one is studying, especially in science or social studies. There are 4 lessons planned. At first the students look at a picture of an "okapi." Together as a class they try to put in their own words what an okapi is. They then together read a paragraph about the okapi and try to paraphrase it. During the next lesson they extend their research and look online at the "National Geographic for Kids" website. In pairs, the students look for more facts about the okapi and paraphrase those facts to be shared and evaluated by other pairs doing the same thing. The third day of doing this lesson, the students paraphrase about a new animal, the "echidna". They look over each others work in pairs. On the fourth day of the paraphrasing lesson, the students choose their own animal on the web to research and paraphrase important information. I think this is an effective lesson because the teacher starts showing how to paraphrase with the class together allowing the students to work with the teacher and then the teacher gets the students to work with a partner doing the assignment, and eventually the students paraphrase an animal on their own. Each lesson allowed for confidence at a different level. (With teacher, in a pair, with peers as evaluators in pairs and on your own) The lesson has a teacher's guided and independent practices and all the resources available. Too bad this website was not in existence when I was doing student teaching. I know I will use it now. This is a very valuable resource for teachers and substitutes when they need some extra guidance.
Sarah Patten

RWT Lesson
Fishing for Readers: Identifying and Writing Effective Opening "Hooks"
The lesson that I chose from RWT is a lesson on grabbers. I chose this lesson because generally my first graders begin all of their stories the same. They either begin by starting with "I" or "One time I." I want them to learn that as readers we get hooked into stories based on the way the author writes and as writers we need to hook our readers. This lesson on grabbers is for grades 3-5, but I chose it because I like the way they use books to show students real hooks in real stories. I have modified this lesson a bit for my first graders, but the general structure of the lesson is the same.
Before talking about a reading "hook," I would ask the students if they knew what a real fishing hook was and what it was used for. I would show them a fishing hook and we would make a web map of what a fishing hook was used for and how it "hooks" fish. I would then expand this to reading and writing and have the students explain why we may call the beginning of stories hooks.
Since many of these students can't read some of the books that are suggested in this lesson, I would read the beginning of some of these books to them. After reading the hooks, I will take a poll to see which students would like to continue reading this book and why about this book makes them want to continue reading. Some of the books that I would choose would be The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs, Alexander and The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, Where the Wild Things Are, If You Give a Pig a Pancake and A Bad Case of Stripes. We then make generalizations as to why these hooks make us want to continue reading.
For session number two, we will review hooks and what they are and why they are important for writers to use hooks. We will then review what some of the hooks we found were. I will then break them up into groups to decide what the hooks have in common and why they made them want to continue reading. We will then discuss how you could use some of these hooks in your writing.
For session three we will talk about how you can start your stories with hooks for your reader. We will brainstorm what hook would go well with a story we have written. We will then discuss this hook with our friend to see if there could be any changes made to it. The students will then add their hooks into their existing stories. They will proofread and then have their friend proof read to see if they need to add anything and if it makes their friend want to continue reading.
I like how RWT connected writing with reading and showed the students that you are readers, but as you read you should be thinking, "how can I use that in my writing." I like how it breaks it up into three sessions and moves slowly through the process so they understand that we can use things that we read in our own writing. It is helpful for them to come to their own conclusions about the hooks and how this affects them as readers and how they can use it as writers. Although I would not teach fairy tales in this lesson, I also like how this lesson brings in fairy tales and how many of them are different versions, but still have the same story structure. There could be so many extensions added onto this lesson, but overall it is a great beginning point for a grabbers lesson.
Heather Fisher

I absolutely love this website. It is a very good resource and tool for teachers to use in their own curriculum. It is very easy to access and offers a ton of information. Educators are able to pull up a very detailed lesson plan in which he/she may utilize in their classroom.
I found a lesson plan: "Word Recognition Strategies Using Nursery Rhymes." It is a cute lesson plan that can be spread out over 3-5 days and incorporates technology, in which I really like. I am a Kindergarten teacher and this lesson is perfect for the age group in which I educate every day.
Student objectives consist of reciting nursery rhymes and other familiar children songs, identifying words with identical endings, brainstorming words that rhyme, categorizing words that belong to certain word families, and access internet to read nursery rhymes and identify word families.
On the first day we would read the popular poem "Humpty Dumpty" which would be typed out on the Activ Board.I would first read it to the students, then I would read each line as they repeat, then we would read it as a group. Drawing the students' attention to the first two lines of the poem, I would ask the students to find me two words whose endings were the same, encouraging them to identify each word by coming up and underlining them on the board (such as fall & wall). By blending the letter sounds together, I would demonstrate how to sound out the word. I would also allow the students to brainstorm how the two words were similiar. After pointing out the three letters the two words had in common (-a-l-l) I would ask the students to come up with other words that rhymed with fall & wall focusing on the fact that only the beginning letter sounds different when rhyming.
Throughout the rest of the week, we would do this with other nursery rhymes such as "Hickory, Dickory Dock" and "Jack and Jill." By the end of the week students would be introduced and more familiar with word families in which they could access Kindergarten friendly websites such as "Starfall" to practice their letter sounds, blends, and rhymes.

After reading lesson plans in different content areas for third grade, I found a lesson in math using one of my favorite trade books, A Chair for My Mother, by Vera B. Williams. The lesson, Exploring Cost and Savings Using Children's Literature,
incorporates math, social studies, language arts, and technology through four different sessions, in a real world application where students can easily connect their own lives. In the first session of this lesson, students will analyze the plot of the story about a family who loses some of their furniture and personal belongings in a fire but find a way to save enough money to purchase mother a new chair. During the read, students are encouraged to make predictions at certain places in the text and then reflect on their prediction after further reading. I think this a great book for showing students how major purchases, like furniture, need to be planned and budgeted.
Once students have read the book and engaged in discussion about the plot, the teacher leads another discussion on how the family saved for the new chair and other possible ways to save money. Students work in groups to write an opinion paragraph about saving money to buy a replacement item or how to find a lost item. In the third session of this lesson, students choose a piece of furniture they would like to purchase after saving money. I really like this part of the lesson because it connects students to their real world. We all have pieces of furniture that for one reason or another, we would like to replace. This exercise allows students to either use the internet or newspaper advertisements to price a piece of furniture for their family. This is a great way for students to learn the value of money and saving. If possible, parents are asked to take students to a furniture store to compare costs on similar furniture. Students must complete a Cost Comparison Chart using three different retailers. In the last session, students discuss the terms income, spending, and saving while discussing their individual Comparison Charts with the class. Students must then complete a savings plan to purchase the items by listing how much they would save and for how long.
I would like to use this lesson with my guided reading groups rather than whole class.

Michelle Carlson

I am officially a ReadWriteThink fan! While looking at the lesson plans, I choose to come up with a set of criteria to evaluate its usefulness in my classroom. First the lesson had to be ESL/ELL friendly; then it needed to have an interactive component and finally, I need to be able to easily incorporate it with our scripted reading program. So after looking at about twenty different lesson plans, I continued to come back to the lesson, A is for Apple: Building Letter-Recognition Fluency. This lesson engaged the students in letter recognition, along with letter name and sound connections.
In the first session, students will become an active participant in the lesson. Students begin by going on a letter around the classroom. Their goal is to find the letter cards that the teacher has hidden. This is a great way to stir up excitement within the classroom. From there, students will assist the teacher in putting the letters in alphabetical order. After this the students are given an independent and interactive activity. Students will be given an ABC Book and they will have to go to a website and find some of the letters, as well as drawing a picture to match. I love this idea of this, because it would allow the students to have their own concrete examples of what the letters look like in their own handwriting. This is a wonderful activity to start and finish during Tech Week at my school.
The second session continues to have the students work on the computer to hear, see and write down/ draw pictures of words that start with each letter. Students will also be paired up during this time. This will allow the teach to scaffold the students learning. By pairing a student who already knows their ABCs and words that begin with each letter, with a student who does not; then the student who is able to can become a leader, who is able to make “child-like” connections, when communicating their thinking process.
The last session is a fun whole group activity that will allow the students to practice sharing everything that they have learned over the past few days, by playing the Uh-Oh! Game. Where students will draw out a letter card, and if they are able to say the letter, letter sound or a word that starts with the letter, then they get to keep it. If a student draws the Uh-Oh card, then they will have to put their letter cards back in the bag.
All three of the sessions met my criteria that I created when looking for a useful lesson. They were all ESL/ELL friendly, they were interactive, and I can easily incorporate these lessons into the Green Band (Sounds & Letters), as well as making the games accessible to students during our workshop time of ImagineIt!
~Rachel Hicks~

The ReadWriteThink website is a wonderful resource for teachers. I found that the site is easy to maneuver around on. You can search based on grade level, type of lesson, or key words. When I was student teaching we had a problem with bullying so I wanted to find a lesson that explored the issue of bullying. I found a lesson called, “A Bad Case of Bullying: Using Literature Response Groups” that focuses on how to talk to Elementary school children about bullying.

The lesson uses The Bad Case of the Stripes by David Shannon. Materials include the book, chart paper, markers, lima beans, index cards and student reflection journals/logs. Read aloud the book, stopping occasionally to ask think-aloud questions, similar to a text talk. After completing the story, discuss parts of the book with students. For example ask, “Were the students in the book bullying Camilla? Why or why not?” After discussing a few questions, have students write in their journals about the book and answer the question, “What is one of the lessons in The Bad Case of the Stripes?

The next day, discuss as a class how Camilla’s classmates treated her. Have students brainstorm with a partner some of the emotions that Camilla felt. After discussing emotions, each student will complete an emotion chart and explain what the characters in the story may have been feeling.

During the final lesson, students will partner up and play a few games on the computer that deal with several situations with bullies. Students will answer situational questions about what they should do if they come into contact with a bully. Finally, students will work together to create a situation where a student is being bullied and will decide on three different solutions to the problem. They will write their situations and solutions on a note card. In the days following the teacher will read aloud a few of the cards and the class will discuss appropriate ways to deal with bullying.

This lesson is a great resource to use with students in third, fourth, or fifth grade. It can be adapted and modified to several different ages. I would love to use this lesson in my future classes.

Whitney Fisher

Integrating Language Arts: If You Give a Mouse a Cookie

This would be a great lesson for kindergarten or first grade. I think it may be a little too easy for second graders though. I would definitely use this lesson in my own first grade classroom. This lesson used the book, If You Give a Mouse a Cookie by Laura Numeroff . At the beginning of the lesson students are invited to examine the pictures and then make predictions. The teacher can also use this time to remind students that sentences begin with capital letters and end with correct punctuation. Students can make predictions throughout the story. This is exactly what my first graders are working on now. In this lesson plan students complete a story circle. I had never heard of a story circle but I think students would really enjoy this activity. They are given a sentence strip and pictures from the story. The students will put the pictures in the same order as in the story, glue them on the sentence strip and glue the sentence strip’s ends together creating a circle.

My favorite part of this lesson was the idea to get together with another class. Students will retell the story to a student from the other class. Children love sharing and teaching other students. This would give students a meaningful reason to retell the story in a clear, sequential way. A way to tie in writing in an authentic way would be to use the lesson from session 4. This is another lesson that I will use in my own classroom. Students are given an “If-Then…Handout”. They will write and illustrate their own version of if...then. I think that my students would be motivated to complete this assignment, especially if they knew that we would make a class book using their completed work.

An extension activity had the book and tape/c.d. available for students at a listening center. I would probably have my students complete some sort of cloze activity after listening to the book. Another extension activity that I would use suggested students read other Laura Numeroff books and use a Venn diagram to compare and contrast books.

Stacy Durham

Adventures in Nonfiction: A Guided Inquiry Journey
Nonfiction text is often difficult for young children to read and comprehend in first grade. This lesson does an outstanding job leading students into the task of learning about nonfiction text. It not only introduces the elements of nonfiction, but also teaches students how to question what they want to learn using a research approach. One of the key components in this lesson is teaching students how to write questions about what a topic of interest and over three lessons teaching students how to use both nonfiction text and technology to answer their questions. The lesson is extremely powerful because the students are in charge of their own inquiry in what they want to learn and answer their own brainstormed questions about their own topic. This is powerful because when students lead their own learning through asking their own questions then finding the answers they have ownership over the process. Also through collaboration with partners students are constantly engaged in what they find as the answers to their questions and what their partners find in the research process. The whole lesson is also clear and concise. The lesson is simple, but the questioning method is a very powerful tool in engaging the students in the learning process with nonfiction text. The teacher is guiding the learning process, but the students are in charge of their learning. This lesson takes a different approaches to just teaching the text features and what to look for when reading nonfiction text to how to encompass it all and truly learn about the students own topic of interest.
Kara Scott

Animal Study: From Fiction to Facts
I chose to review this lesson because the first grade classroom that I work with at my school just finished a unit about animal groups. Student objectives in this lesson include comparing information from both fiction and nonfiction texts about animals, creating fact charts in whole group formats, using the internet to find more factual information about animals and recording factual information about animals. The lesson basically has the teacher reading one fiction and one nonfiction book about ants to the class and afterward the class, as a group, makes a chart about the factual information they learned about ants through both types of books. I thought it was a clever way to both talk about the difference between fiction and nonfiction as well as present facts about ants in a different way, as opposed to simply stating the facts and discussing them. In the lesson, the teacher asks questions that lead the students to discover the facts about ants their own. Also, this lesson could be applied to any animal, not just ants. So if I were to work with first grade next year while they are doing animal groups, I could use this lesson plan with any of the different kinds of animals they are studying, I would just need to change the books.
I also thought the internet component was interesting. My first reaction was there was no way six year olds could do internet research without serious one-on-one guidance. After looking at the sites suggested by the readwritethink lesson plan, I’m still unsure about the readwritethink website, but I’m not completely opposed to possibly doing a whole group lesson on how to do a simple search on a search engine such as Ask Jeeves for Kids for information on a certain topic, and then having students try on their own in small groups, maybe two or three at time. I think it would be beneficial to begin to start teaching them how to do that kind of thing, but they would need a lot of guidance!

Kim Strzelecki