Guest Poster Shearer-ly Sadler: RACE Reading Responses

Hello ATUE Readers!  This is Tobi from Shearer-ly Sadler 4th Grade guest blogging today!  This is so exciting to be over here to share! I am fairly new to the blogging and TPT world but not to the teaching profession.  I have been teaching elementary school for 14 years and a National Board Certified Teacher for 5 years.  So... I'm going to jump right in today. 

Do your students have difficulty expressing their thoughts when responding to reading?  Mine do and traditionally have experienced this on Kentucky's Common Core State Standards assessment (K-PREP).  This is my districts third year with Common Core so our principal steered us toward Genre Based instruction.  Biographies is my fourth genre based unit this year and since Kentucky has been hit very hard by Ol' Man Winter, I decided to start with a new classic, Snowflake Bentley.  This biography accomplishes many of the Common Core reading informational standards:  I took these from www.corestandards.org: 

• CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.4.1 Refer to details and examples in a text when explaining what the text says explicitly and when drawing inferences from the text.
• CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.4.2 Determine the main idea of a text and explain how it is supported by key details; summarize the text.
• CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.4.3 Explain events, procedures, ideas, or concepts in a historical, scientific, or technical text, including what happened and why, based on specific information in the text.
• CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.4.4 Determine the meaning of general academic and domain-specific words or phrases in a text relevant to a grade 4 topic or subject area.     
• CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.4.5 Describe the overall structure (e.g., chronology, comparison, cause/effect, problem/solution) of events, ideas, concepts, or information in a text or part of a text.

K-Prep questions are very deep thinking questions, even the multiple choice questions.  However, you can put MCQ's in front of my students and generally they can answer them well all day long.  But you put an constructed response question in front of them and they freeze.  MCQ's show they know the content, but when asked to apply and retrieve text based evidence, the show significant difficulty.  Part of these genre based units, at least for me, have been to really focus on written responses to reading.  I have been developing task cards with DOK (depth of knowledge) Level 1 & 2 questions for most of the year, but not focusing on them well.  I have been making them part of the daily 4-5 rotations while I teach small group guidedt instruction.  They have been general questions that pertain to any given text.  These questions for Snowflake Bentley were text dependent and required some mental effort on the students part. 

So after the questions were written based on the above mentioned standards, I had students pull out their basals.  I am NOT a basal teacher unless I have to be.  However, this story was included in our Treasures basal in its entirety and that makes for some easy access to multiple copies! 

I always have students read something multiple times.  Our first reading is first and foremost for enjoyment.  So, I allowed children to get into groups of three to four (which allowed for peer reading support).  then each group discussed what they enjoyed about the text.  I circulate during these discussions and eavesdrop!  After each group finished their initial reading and text discussion , they were allowed to choose one of the task cards with the direction that after the choice was made, a second reading of the text would take place with the purpose of finding text evidence in support of their task card response.  I was amazed at how much these very focused questions had them taking notes from the text and REFERING BACK TO THE TEXT OFTEN!!!  Why this is so difficult for my students, I don't know...

After these notes were taken, each person in the group was to formulate a response using our RACE extended response organizing strategy.  Restate, Answer the question, Connect to text, Extend to yourself or the world...They compiled all responses to hand in, choosing one and placing it on the top of the stack to be a part of the Snowflake Bentley Gallery Walk.  These chosen responses were reviewed by me and handed back the next day for revisions by each group. 
Here are a few examples of their written responses:

 This couldn't be the end of the session because there were just too many standards and each question was only correlated to one.  Thus the Gallery Walk was born.  I took the chosen response from each group and placed them around the room.  Students were then given this response grid

This allowed nearly all questions to be answered by each student.  It also stretched their little bloom's taxonomy legs getting students to evaluate other students' answers.  Here are the kiddos in action on their Gallery Walk

 

Here are some samples of the evaluation tool

 To make sure this activity was accessible for all, I paired students up with a peer if they required a reader or scribe and I also circulated to coach students through their answers. 

I was so pleased with this lesson.  It took me about 3-4 days to work though it and then I gave an assessment over the standard.  Great responses this time and I could see so much more close reading and attention text details in their assessment answers.  I plan to include this in a larger biography unit include some wordwork and other standard specific/congruent activities.
As a thank you to ATUE readers click here to get my RACE poster for FREE!  Also, this Snowflake Bentley Biography Lesson will be available at my TPT store as a flash freebie for the next 24 hours!!!

It was great to be here at All Things Upper Elementary today!  Come on over to Shearer-ly Sadler 4th grade and leave me some love and I might just have another little freebie for you!! 

Shearerly Sadler 4th Grade
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Guest Post: Collaboration Cuties, How to Use Mentor Texts

Hey there!!  This is Amanda from Collaboration Cuties and I am so excited to be guest blogging here today!!

Today, I wanted to share with you how we use mentor texts in our classroom!  If you follow our blog at all, you know that we loooooove mentor texts!  We have a linky each week devoted to it!  If you haven't stopped by to see all of the amazing texts linked up, start HERE  (after reading this post!) to check out what we've been up to!!  Be warned!!!  I had to switch to an Amazon Prime account after we started this linky because there were so many great texts linked up that I HAD TO HAVE RIGHT THEN!  ;O)

Okay, so on with using mentor texts...I  know that a lot of upper elementary teachers are departmentalized, so it may be that this particular book isn't something you might use, but you will get the general feel for how you could use any mentor text, no matter the subject area you teach in!

The book I want to tell you about is called Roanoke, The Lost Colony by Jane Yolen.  Jane Yolen is definitely one of my favorite authors because she is amazing at writing historical fiction!

We are just getting started with our unit in Social Studies on the Thirteen Colonies, and I am launching it with this book.  Here is the description from Amazon:

In 1587 John White was chosen by Sir Walter Raleigh to lead a new colony at Roanoke off the Atlantic coast. After bringing many men, women, and children to the new land, White went back to England to gather supplies for the long winter. But when he finally returned to the fort almost three years later, he found that all of the colonists had vanished. The only signs of life left were the letters CRO carved into a tree and the word CROATOAN carved into one of the fort's posts. Some people think that the Spanish army captured the colonists; some people think that the local native people murdered them; others think that the colonists went off to live with the native people and start a new life. Still others think that the colonists tried to sail home to England and were lost at sea. No one knows for sure. 

When I use the term mentor text, I am talking about a text that will be used for more than one reading or lesson.  Usually, if I truly wanted to use a book as a mentor text, I try to use it over a week long period.

In planning to use this book, here are the lessons I would use with it.  Since each of us has different amounts of time for our language arts block or social studies block (or whichever subject you teach), I will just number the lessons since we would all have to do it at our own pace that works within our classroom.  :O)

Lesson 1

First off, I would read the book in social studies.  I am using this as a launch for the unit, so I want to make that social studies connection.  I would not read the vocabulary yet...that comes in lesson 2.

While reading the book, I would have my students fill out a FQR chart.  I could type out one for them, but since we use interactive notebooks, I would have them complete this in their journals.

The purpose of a FQR chart is to engage students with the text and get them thinking and questioning what they are reading (or hearing read).  They write down facts in the left column, questions they have about the fact in the middle, and if they find a response in the text, they can fill in the response column, or, they may have to make an inference.  Here is an example we might write while we are reading the text.

Now, this text has some great features to it.

From Roanoke, The Lost Colony

Each set of pages has a "sticky note" with vocabulary words on it from the passage.  It also has facts on the spiral bound page (like the one on the left) that gives even more information.

So...

Lesson 2

Vocabulary-  There is a lot of great vocabulary highlighted in this book (and she put it on sticky notes, which I love about her!).  So, I would read the book again, but focus on the vocabulary words.  We would complete a vocabulary chart in our reading notebooks using these words.  

We've used a chart as simple as this (yes, I know it's not very cute...)   ;O)

Or, one like this, which you can get in our TpT store for free by clicking on the picture.

Depending on which organizer I used, I may have them inference what the word means, or I may just read the sentence it is in and have them use context clues BEFORE reading the definition on the sticky notes to check their thinking.  I would also take the time to point out how Jane Yolen inserted the definitions cleverly throughout instead of at the end in a glossary.

Lesson 3

We are working on informational writing right now and I would ask students to go back into their rough draft, and decide how they want to highlight key vocabulary.  Some may have already highlighted them, while others may be making a glossary.  Now, they have another option to try in their own writing!

Lesson 4

Close reading- Here, we would do a close reading of this page in the text.  This is the first page.  I would photocopy this (since one page is allowed to be copied from the book) and we would paste it into our journals.

First off, there is quite a bit of vocabulary here that is not defined in the book.  We would discuss this.  Then, we would discuss cause and effect, highlighting causes in one color and the effects in a different color.  

Some of the sentences state events that could be a cause and an effect.  We would write those in our journals as both, showing their relationships.  For example, the passage says that the native people were infected with European diseases.  Well, the colonists coming to their land caused this.  But, since they were infected with the diseases, the effect (that isn't stated) is that many of the native people died.  We would add this in our reading journals.

There are several pages in this text that could be used for this skill.  A few pages after this first page, there is another passage with less information.  This would be a great passage to use to differentiate in small groups with a lower reading group.

Lesson 5

Writing-  I would have them write in their writing journals about what they think happened at Roanoke and to use evidence from the text, and what we had been learning, to support their thinking.  At the end of the book, there are theories that Jane Yolen shares about what may have happened.  Also, with writing, I would have them write about whether they think John White made a good decision to bring colonists with them and then to leave them, using evidence to back up their thinking.  

There is also a timeline, so this is a great text feature to share with students.  They can easily make a timeline as we start our colonies unit and continually add to it as we go along in social studies!

Other Activities:

We use mentor sentences in our classroom to teach grammar within writing.  If I were to choose a sentence from this book (which was really hard!) I'd choose this sentence:

On August 18, White's daughter Eleanor gave birth to Virginia Dare, the first English child born in America.

I would choose this sentence to work on the following grammar skills:  capitalization, dates, possessive noun, commas.

(For more about how we use mentor sentences, you can go to our post HERE.)

Fact and opinion- Students could discuss facts and opinions with this text (what did Jane Yolen include that were facts and what may have been her opinions) or have them create their own fact and opinion game using facts from the story.  On cards, they could write facts and then their own opinions and have classmates play the game, sorting by facts and opinions.

There are really so many things that you can do with just one book...I could go on and on...but I won't because I don't want to overwhelm you!!  :O)  This is just a topic that I LOVE!!

Hopefully you found something in this post that you could use! If you have any questions, please let us know!  Thank you so much to All Things Upper Elementary for hosting us!

Stop by and see us sometime!!

Amanda

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