curriculum

For literacy, I love this school district site: www.wrsd.net/literacy 

On this site, I find scripted mini-lessons for those really important lessons and a year-long calendar of readers workshop minilessons which contains the meat of a teaching objective.  Go to the left-hand side of the page and hover over Elementary Curriculum, then look at both the focus lessons, which are scripted, and the unit trajectories, or curriculum maps. 

My school became a Writer's Workshop school this year. We were trained by the staff developers at Teacher's College Reading and Writing Project.

Our students have made amazing progress this year. They have really bought into the idea of being writers. It doesn't hurt that we frequently tell them they are writers or that we have author's celebrations at the end of each month.

Part of what makes the curriculum so rich is the books we read and later re-read like writer's. (I wrote a lesson plan about how mentor text lessons tend to go: click here.)

Check it out --at the bottom of the page-- and add these books to your writing curriculum!

Today was the last in a series of trainings I attended with a cohort on Balanced Literacy and NUA (National Urban Alliance).  Our balanced literacy component focus for the day was guided reading.  Our thinking map of the day was a flow map.  To combine the two we discussed guided reading as three or four parts: planning, before reading/priming, during reading/processing and after reading/retaining.

After Reading

I love the author David Shannon, who's well known for No, David. Yesterday, I read his book Duck on Bike to model writing a WASL (Washington's state assessment) short summary with three main events. As I read I emphasized the inner thinking and thought to myself, "This would be a great mentor text to show inner thinking. There's inner thinking on almost every page!" :-) All the animals have their own opinions about Duck's trick, which they only share in their thoughts.Want to try it?

After my 'aha' moment with Comprehension Connections I bought the book all excited to put it to use. I'm an ELL support teacher with over 70 students so I don't provide the daily read alouds and mini-lessons for most of my students. More often than not I have 15-30 minutes with students to do guided reading and/or fluency work. While I haven't been able to try as much as I'd like so far, I have liked how simple the lesson ideas have been for me and students.

I just finished reading Because of Winn-Dixie by the amazing Kate DiCamillo.  If you've read anything by Kate DiCamillo you know that her stories are worth reading to children of just about any age.  If you need some convincing, here are some other ideas.