Read With Me Cultivating a Literary Community 

We’ve been learning a lot lately about test-taking.  We’ve had so much to do, it’s been hard to keep you all up-to-date.  So, we’ve decided to “kill two birds with one stone”.  Please take a moment to welcome our newest addition — our Test-Taking Genre Study Wiki! 

We’re using this as a whole group tool to record our findings as we analyze tests and test questions, review our test-taking strategies, and, in general, become EXPERT testers. 

Take a few moments to investigate what we’ve worked on so far.  Be sure to come back soon to stay informed!

In order for our author study to be a success, we needed to orient ourselves to the expectations for our journey.  Students in standards-based classrooms are taught that standards ard goals we expect for them to achieve.  Today, we discussed a variety of standards that we’ll be addressing through this author study, and what that equates to as far as my expectations for them.

Here is a summary of what we discussed.

I will expect my good, third grade readers to notice…

• When things don’t make sense.  (Reading Standard 2:  Self-Monitoring)
• What the author is trying to say.  Is there an underlying theme?  (Reading Standard 3:  Literature, Writing Standard 2:  Responding to Literature)
  
• Interesting language/new words (Reading Standard 2:  Comprehension, Reading Standard 3:  Vocabulary Building)
• Similarities/differences between books (Reading Standard 2:  Comprehension, Reading Standard 3:  Reading a Lot, Reading Standard 3:  Literature, Writing Standard 2:  Responding to Literature)
• How a story relates to something in the author’s life (Reading Standard 2:  Comprehension)
• How to talk and write about characters (Reading Standard 2:  Comprehension)

Today, readers had a brief period of time in class to explore Allen Say’s books in partners and practice thinking, noticing, and discussing their reading like good third grade readers.  Here are some of their early noticings.

This student pair noted some interesting new words from their reading.  (confound, fishmonger, thieving, motion, Spaniard)

This student pair noticed that the book they read connected to another Allen Say book: they shared the same setting.

This student pair noticed a pattern in Allen Say’s writing: he writes mostly about Asian culture and people.

Cody and his partner noticed the cultural similarities, and also found the same character in more than one book!