Reading for Intermediate and Advanced Learners, Spring, 2011

I used cooperative learning for my second strategy. I am trying this with my kinder students and they did rather well for their first time. I had each child pick a colored stick out of the jar and the like colors formed a group. Each group had an envelope with colored squares in it and they had 10 minutes to come up with a pattern.Eahc group was asked questions about the pattern when the time was complete. This was the first time I tried grouping students in this manner. I did not like this format because while it was fun and exciting for the kids to pick from the jar, my groups were unstructured. One group had all low performing students and one has high performing students and they were finished within seconds. The next time I complete this activity, I will designate the groups myself so I have varied abilities in them. Because the groups were not structured, I did not get a clear feel of how successful my students can be with this strategy and not all students felt successful.

The third strategy I used was Shared reading. Students will read along in the big book Mrs. Wishy Washy. Before reading I will dress up a student in slippers, an apron, bandana and give him a scrub brush and soap and ask what it is used for to activate prior knowledge. We will read through the first day and make predictions. Over the course of several days, students will participate in "shared" reading through choral reading and participating in the animal movements and gestures and sounds.
Students will put up and read sentence strips from the story. Students will read the story one day with animal masks.
Students make their favorite character from the story and attach it ot the "Pudding" mud pile we made. Students will contrast our mud and real mud using a venn diagram.