After a trip to the zoo this morning, I grabbed a lawn chair and got to work organizing my ideas for next year. I realize that this is a little crazy, but I want to get started when my thoughts are still fresh.
One of the big changes I want to make next year is to add more informational text into our literature lessons. When I worked in public schools, the push was for all nonfiction, all the time. The only people that seemed to get to teach literature were high school English teachers. I worked so hard to research nonfiction strategies and to develop new strategies that fit my students' needs. I felt that leaving out fiction texts was creating an imbalance of reading skills, but I understood it (to a certain degree). Well, now that I am at a private school, I've found that I'm not teaching anywhere close to the same amounts of nonfiction. I added nonfiction connecting texts along the way, but I did not feel that these lessons were as artistically and authentically woven into the curriculum as I would have liked. So, I will be spending the summer revamping the curriculum to make the connections between nonfiction and fiction both relevant and purposeful. As I mentioned in an earlier post (the last one, maybe), I have so many different ones that I use, that I will probably have to wait until I assess the kids to make final determinations. I love doing this sort of thing.
Anyway, that was way to long of a description to explain what this post is about. As I think about how I want to teach the nonfiction parts of our units, I am going to have several active reading activities to meet the different needs of the kids. To get prepared, I am recreating ALL of my strategy organizers in power point. They print better, they look better, and I like them better.
I started posting some of the ones I created on TPT, and will post more as I get them done. The ones that I am posting are easy to use with any subject area. I am still thinking that I will try to create a bundle of my favorite reading activities that anyone can use for teaching nonfiction. I will go into detail of each one in future posts, but here is what I have up on TPT so far:
I just finished the ABC Notes redo today. Most people I know use this as a prereading activity, but I use it as a way to take notes while actively reading. The kids write down all of the information the gather from the text on the chart. Students can either record topic specific vocabulary that start with the letter, important people and places that begin with that letter, or create a phrase about the topic using a strong verb that starts with each letter. I love using this note taking method. Creating the phrases takes a good comprehension skills, not to mention great critical thinking skills. When I introduce the activity, I usually "encourage" students to create at least 1-2 strong verb phrases, but by the third or fourth time using this method, I start requiring a certain number of phrases. It is a great way to both challenge the kids reading and thinking skills and assess what students need some support (not to mention those that may need to be pushed a bit more). Love this.
All of these activities can be found in my TPT store, and I will go into more detail about each in future posts. I hope it is as much of a beautiful day wherever you are as it is here!
~L
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