Welcome to Workshop Wednesday!! 🙂
Today is my LAST DAY OF SCHOOL!!! Oh my heavens, I can’t believe it. I can smell the sweet fragrance of summer just around the corner!! 🙂
Before I get into the meat of this post, I wanted to let you know that Workshop Wednesday will be changing JUST FOR THE SUMMER. During the month of June and the month of July, I will have two different topics (one for each month) that will remain open for the whole month. I hope that you won’t all forget about me this summer with a less frequent linky, but I just don’t think my linky parties lend themselves as well to our posts when we aren’t in school. I’ve got some ideas for these two though- I think you’ll enjoy them, and they’ll still be easy to link up to! 🙂 More to come soon!!
OK, so now on to the good stuff!! Today’s topic is reading responses! How do you have students respond to their reading?
I’m so excited to share this with you, because it has definitely been a work in progress over the last couple of years! I teach my students to record their thinking on sticky notes as they read. This requires a lot of modeling and think-alouds in the beginning of the year, of course, but they become REALLY good at it!
**I apologize for not having any personal pictures of all this!! My kids took home their notebooks before I could snap some pics! Darn it!!**
I give them this bookmark which I made based on the “Talking Back To Books” Poster from Beth Newingham. (I print them on different colors of cardstock and laminate them- mine still have them completely intact from the beginning of this year!)
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| Click to download these for free from Dropbox! |
These bookmarks train their brain to think as they read. Once I feel like they have the hang of writing as they read, I discuss levels of thinking with them. I found this great anchor chart on Pinterest last summer and made it for this year (mine was already put up, so here is the original pin picture I found…):
We talk about how we only want level two and level three sticky notes because they really show we are thinking. I then teach them how to “write long” off of a sticky note. I found another great pin last summer to show this idea, although I have been teaching my kiddos for the last couple of years how to do this. Here is the pin:
It is very important that they have level two or level three sticky notes to be able to write long… otherwise, as you can imagine, their response won’t be… long. Ha!
I used to have them write me letters, but I feel like sticky note responses are easier for me to keep up with as far as grading and conferring goes. I still have them write me letters sometimes, but writing long from a sticky note is done at least weekly, and it’s super easy to check in on with them for comprehension! In fact- here are the labels I made for sticky note conferences! 🙂
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| Click to download this EDITABLE freebie from Dropbox, too! |
I walk around with these labels on my clipboard and meet with as many as I can… then I just stick these down in the reading profile folders after I’ve filled up one label page! I have quick evidence of their independent thinking. We talk together as I fill it in about their compliment and their thing to work on!
Your turn! Make sure to grab the button and link your post back to this post (no TPT store link-ups, please), then make sure to leave some love for at least two others in this linky party!
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