Navigating Non-Fiction In Reader's Workshop

I hope you are having a WONDERFUL winter break! To celebrate the upcoming New Year, I have uploaded my Reader's Workshop unit Navigating Non-Fiction to my store!

The unit of study has 13 sessions for your students to investigate the genre of non-fiction. Each session has a detailed lesson plan, anchor charts, and a group task.

In the first session, students ready their minds to reading non-fiction by identifying features which distinguish fiction from non-fiction.

Each session includes an anchor chart and a group investigation!

I hope you enjoy my new resource! 

Visit my store for this resource and many others!

Building A Reading Life

It is time to begin, to set Reader’s Workshop into motion. The work of utmost importance, the work that unites and underlines the unit of study, Building A Reading Life,  is to help students become avid and reflective readers. 

The purpose of the Building A Reading Life unit is to launch a lifelong passion for reading - to  empower readers with a sense of personal agency about their own reading. This unit of study, based on the work of Lucy Calkins, focuses on ownership for building their own reading life. This powerful message resonates throughout the unit of study as readers self-select books, set reading goals, monitor their comprehension and fluency, and actively discuss their reading with peers. As the conclusion of the three bends in Building A Reading Life, students will have begun to build a reading life by fashioning a literate identity for themselves.

 

Classroom Organization

Here is a sneak peak at my unfinished classroom library. The bookshelf showcases my classroom library. The baskets are organized by genre, popular authors, favourite series, and subject areas. The basket labels change throughout as student interest dictates. The baskets are from the Dollar Store. I made my labels and the resource is available in my TPT store. The bin labels are laminated, hole punched, and attached to the basket with a cable tie. This allows quick and easy change of basket labels if needed. 

Each book is labelled with a coordinating book label. The book labels are part of my Classroom Library Label resource. The top shelf will display featured mentor texts. The black and white box holds read aloud aids - a pointer, reading fingers, sticky notes, highlighter tape, highlighters, small white board, dry erase markers, etc.

The lower bookshelf holds student duotangs and notebooks. As the students have flexible seating, their duotangs and notebooks are housed in a central location. The baskets are from Michaels and the labels are from my store. 

The bulletin board is a work in progress as school does not begin for two weeks. It is my Focus Board. The schedule cards are placed in the organizer on the left. The four clipped board will showcase the outcomes. The black board underneath will showcase I Can statements. On the far right, two canvas prints feature quotes to inspire students. I have yet to hang the third poster and the Focus Wall title.

Hope you enjoyed the preview!

Facebook

Eclectech Educator is on Facebook!
Follow me for freebies!

Classroom Organization

I have moved to a new school this year, so I decided to reorganize all of my materials and rethink how I organize my classroom. Whew! It is an exhausting process and I hope I can finish before school starts in two weeks.

Below is a sneak peek of an in-progress look at my classroom.

My manipulatives are organized into decorative boxes in the bookshelf. The boxes are organized by the big conceptual ideas in grade three: place value, addition and subtraction, fractions, geometry, measurement, multiplication and division, and statistics and probability. Baskets and two decorative boxes contain manipulates I use throughout the year, such as linking cubes, playing cards, dice, etc.

The bulletin board will display anchor charts and word wall cards. I created the header in PowerPoint.

The baskets on the shelf are for our M.A.T.H. rotation. For more information about the M.A.T.H. rotation, please see Laura Santos' blog post.

The table will display manipulatives and needed materials to complete tasks in the M.A.T.H. rotation or to provide extra practice if needed.

Visit my blog regularly for updates on my classroom organization!

Rotating Banner

Playing today! Thrilled with my new rotating banner for my TPT store!

Place Value

Number sense  refers to a student’s “fluidity and flexibility with numbers,” (Gersten & Chard, 2001). The student has a sense of what numbers mean, understands their relationship to one another, is able to perform mental math, understands symbolic representations, and can use those numbers in real world situations. 

The National Council of Teachers in 1989 identified the following five components that characterize number sense: 

•  Number meaning
• Number relationships 
• Number magnitude 
• Operations involving numbers and referents for number 
• Referents for numbers and quantities

Conceptual understanding of place value is integral to the development of numbers sense. Followers have asked about how I teach place value, as it is often the unit which kicks off a new school year. Due to requests, I have updated my Place Value resource on my TPT store. Click on the picture to obtain your free sample of my unit.

We begin by playing with big numbers and developing a sense of magnitude - students love reading and writing numbers beyond 1 000. We read their phone number as a large number and look for examples of the magnitude of numbers in our environment. Reading Schwartz' How Much is A Million culminates the investigation.

The students represent numbers in a variety of compositions - standard form, expanded form, written form, and with models. Activities for representing numbers are included in my freebie.

We continue with looking at number patterns on the hundreds chart, calendars, and on number lines. Activities for the hundreds chart and calendars are included in the free resource. This leads to an investigation of skip counting patterns. Students love to make a series of patterns - one which contains an error - and have a classmate deduce the incorrect sequence. We progress to order numbers in ascending and descending order.

We represent the relationship between numbers symbolically using <, >, and =. Again, activities to develop these conceptual understandings are found in my freebie.

The unit finishes with a look at estimating using referents. We place numbers on a number line and round numbers to the nearest 10 and 100. Once again, activities can be found in the free resource. The image below is the game board for the rounding activity.

I hope you had a restful summer and these ideas help make the transition back to school easier!

Persuasive Texts In Readers' Workshop

My new unit of study, Persuasive Texts In Readers' Workshop, has been posted to my TPT store. Post a comment on my blog or Facebook page to receive a sample freebie.

Persuade

Upcoming! My Readers' Workshop unit, Persuade, will be uploaded to my TPT store this week.

Students have opinions and often unabashedly share their thoughts with others. This unit of study moves students from an introspective look at their identity to a shift to communitarian awareness. Students explore the persuasive techniques for advocating a position, selling a product, and inciting action. The unit of study moves from analyzing multimedia, to exploring social movements, and culminating in an engagement in activism in order to broaden an intra-cultural perspective, increase empathy for others, and dispel stereotypes.

The unit of the study has 13 sessions Each big idea, or session, has the following:

•  Session Synopsis
• Anchor Chart(s)
• Word Cards
• Purposeful Task
• Response Prompt

Interested? Post a comment with your contact information and I will send you a freebie sample!

Saskatchewan School Library Association

Today was my last meeting as an Executive member of the Saskatchewan School Library Association. Ten wonderful years were spent learning and laughing with colleagues who pushed for school libraries to be the centre of collaboration and literacy.

Thank you to Charlotte Raine for the beautiful tribute.

Rocks and Minerals

Whew! Uploaded Rocks and Minerals Anchor Charts and Word Wall to my TPT store today. My students have enjoyed sorting and classifying rocks and minerals. They enjoyed testing the hardness of minerals and determining if Moh's Scale of Hardness is correct.

The Rocks and Minerals Anchor Charts and Word Wall helped students grasp new vocabulary and visualize concepts. The Word Wall cards assisted in composing responses, as well as sorting activities.

So excited! My Poetry Unit is available in my TPT store today.

Today, we studied Carroll's poem "Jabberwocky". Students loved inferring the meaning of the poet's nonsensical words.

View a sample of a response from a grade three student below.

Respond in the comment box if you are interested in a freebie - an overview of the session in which I shared "Jabberwocky".

Biographies, Readers' Workshop, and Technology Infusion

Great geniuses have the shortest biographies. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Biography means "writing about life." There are many reasons to introduce students to biographies.

1. Biographies provide a historical perspective of people who braved challenges in a vastly different time or social period.
2. Biographies provide life lessons gleaned from others' life experiences and behaviours. 
3. Biographies create empathy and understanding of others. The story of someone who may have lived in a different era or with a different background exposes students to things they may never experience. Reading another’s story helps them to appreciate their differences or find comfort in our sameness. 
4. Biographies extend students' view into the future. Hearing about what others have accomplished despite their circumstance encourages them to dream. It gives them hope that they can meet the challenges that come their way. 

There is no shortage of biographies written for elementary students. As the students read biographies, there are many web tools and apps to help students delve into the lives of fascinating people.

ThingLink allows the creation of interactive images by adding video, music, and text to uploaded images. Take pictures and video of events within the historical era which impacted the subject's life. Once media has been collected, hotspot areas on the ThingLink to provide more information.

Blabberize
Blabberize is a web tool which creates a talking picture of person’s face. Upload a picture of the subject of the biography and add a hotspot to move with the recording. After customizing the picture, record a short biography assuming the role of the historical figure.


Timeline Interactive

This interactive from Read Write Think creates a graphical representation of a subject's life by displaying items sequentially along a line.

Adobe Spark Post
Adobe Spark Post is a free online and mobile graphic design app. Create beautiful images that help tell the subject of a biography's story by highlighting infamous quotes.

 

Bio Cube
This interactive tool from Read Write Think allows students to develop an outline of a person whose biography they have just read. Specific prompts ask students to describe a person's significance, background, and personality.



View a detailed unit of study on Biographies. Students will examine the big ideas of narrative and expository biographies and develop skills and strategies to enhance reading fluency and comprehension. Students will explore cause-and-effect, sequence, language cues and conventions, visualization, determining importance, and synthesis.

Biographies

Biography means "writing about life." In my newest unit of study entitled Biographies, readers will apply their knowledge about reading narratives, and apply these understandings to a different structure called narrative nonfiction. Readers will read to learn not only about the significant character, but also the group of people that person represents and the groups of people that person impacted. That is, readers read biographies not only to learn about specific famous figures, but also to learn about the world in which they live and to extract life lessons. 

The unit is divided into three bends: 

1. Connect their knowledge of fictional story structures to focus on the deep comprehension and synthesis of story elements of narrative nonfiction.
2. Examine the unifying idea or message behind a life story, learning that a biography is often a commentary on society at large. 
3. Apply their understandings about biographies to ease them into understanding the structures and patterns of other forms of narrative nonfiction. 

The primary goal of this unit of study is to help students become stronger readers. The main objective is not to learn content, but rather to learn how to read the genre of biography. Reading skills, rather than the details of a remarkable person’s life, are the emphasis. Readers will use story grammar to determine importance, to synthesize, and to analyze critically across long stretches of text, ultimately growing theories about them.

Throughout the twelve sessions, readers develop the ability to find connections, explain the meaning of unexpected actions, and make arguments about the significance of the person's accomplishments or life activities.  

I hope you enjoy the study of Biographies as much as my students!