As I have mentioned before I am trying to integrate The Power of Retelling into my Daily 5 (or Literacy Workshop) program. So far we are just in the guided retelling stage and things are moving slowly but I am really happy with how things are going. We hit a small snag this week and won't be doing a "Book of the Week" for the first time since the school year started but I am feeling okay about it.
We are up to 17 minutes of stamina in Read to Self!!! I am sooo excited about how well things are going. I think that quite a few of my Grade 3 friends need some help choosing books that are a good fit but all things in good time right? Plus my class LOVES Read to Self so that is a huge bonus. I was even able to get a few reading assessments done today as I am hoping to start guided reading asap!
We have also started to do Working on Writing and are up to 5 minutes for our stamina. I think my class can do more but I also know how important it is not to rush things. We have been working on procedural writing separately from Work on Writing and my class needs A LOT of work on how to complete a task effectively in pairs so right now that is taking some precedence over building our stamina too quickly.
Here's a quick freebie of some of the things we have been doing for procedural writing.
I am quite happy with how things are progressing in my Literacy program and hope things continue to go as planned!!
Now, to talk about my Book of the Week program.
This is how I have organized the front blackboard of my classroom according to my reading of The Power of Retelling by Vicki Benson. Each week I pick a picture book (so far- it could be non-fiction or non-continuous texts as well) and we work through the book together over the course of the week.
On Monday we make predications based first on just the title and then on the title and the cover photo. You can see a line on the board to show where we made predictions after we could see the cover.
We also look at vocabulary on Monday. Sometimes I give the students a list of words that I think are important from the book, as you can see- they are the three words above the line. Below the line are the words the students predicted might be in the text based on the predictions they made on what the text might be about...whoa, that's a lot of predicting!!
It's very interesting to hear the reasons behind why the students are making their predictions. :)
On Tuesday, we read the book together and do a variety of activities to show our understanding of the book. So far we have just been working on things we have noticed in the book. For this particular book I also asked my students to list the actions that made Tacky different than the other penguins (in the book Tacky the Penguin) because I am working up to talking about character traits and the evidence we can use to show that a character has a specific trait.
On Thursday we have been working on our interpretations. In this case we looked at the list of actions Tacky did that made him different and what it told us about him. I was very happy with how my students were able to think really deeply during this activity and used their schema effectively.
On Friday we retell the story. Our end goal is for students to be able to write their own retell but obviously in the first weeks of school that is just not happening. During this week I copied some of the pictures from the book and the students and I worked through an illustrated retell orally.
I think I am close to being able to move on from a Guided Retell to a Story Map Retell and am very excited about my student's progress. Word Work is next on the list for our Literacy Workshop as well as getting Guided Reading up and going.
Isn't it nice when things are chugging along?
