Responding to Reading: Double-Entry Journals* Freebie!

One interesting way to use reader's notebooks is a double-entry journal. In a double-entry journal, you have a two-column page. On the top of the left side is a quote that is directly lifted from the text. On the top right, respond to the line of text. Monitor your thinking and explain how you reacted to the quote.

To use double-entry journals with your kids, be sure to model, model, model. If you pause and open up your brain for your kids enough, they can start to think in the complex way you're modeling. Here's a little script you might use for a double-entry journal.

1. Choose a book you will honestly react to. I love anything by Eve Bunting, but I'm generally in tears by the end of the book, so maybe stick to Patricia Polacco.
2. Read a part of the book and stop after a line that meant something to you.
3. Say: "This line is very powerful. I think I'm going to stop and think about it."
4. Record the quote on the left side.
5. Model thinking aloud on the quote. You may use the following as starters:
- I am surprised/shocked/saddened/excited because...
- This makes me think of....
- This reminds me of another book I read where...
- I chose this quote because...
- Because of this, I think ___ will happen because...
- I wonder...

This is a double entry written by one of my fourth graders when we read Esperanza Rising.

  A few tips for double-entry journals: 1. Don't kill it. Any strategy, when overused, gets pretty boring pretty fast. Choose some great texts to use this strategy with, periodically; not every time kids read! 2. Read the responses! You'll be surprised how interesting they are, and how much they tell you about your kids. 3. Model, model, and then model some more. Children don't just pick up new strategies like this. We need to give them opportunities to try it out together. 4. Talk it out. If kids are having trouble getting started writing on their own, have them talk to a partner about their thinking, or make a class-wide dialogue entry together. 5. Use sentence starters to help kids (and yourself) think. A sample anchor chart is included on this post about monitoring comprehension!

    Try it out and let me know how it goes! And for more ideas, check out "Responding to Reading," a freebie on TPT!

Or my new Scaffolded Reading Responses for Fiction!

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Studying Characters' Emotions

One great book to use to help students understand characters' emotions is The Way I Feel by Janan Cain. It's a beautifully illustrated book. On each set of facing pages, there is an emotion represented in the tones and colors of the illustration. The text rhymes and does a vivid job of describing that specific emotion, showing kids when they might feel that way.

 

To make inferences using The Way I Feel during a read aloud, simply cover up the emotion with a post-it. Have students gather clues by recording the details the character says, does, and what other characters are doing. The illustrations make a great place to gather information too!

Then they can infer the emotion depicted on each page. If kids are stuck, provide them an Emotions List like this freebie I've made for you on Google Drive

 

Grab the freebie here!

Then we worked with making inferences on some character emotions task cards. I handed out the cards to students and they highlighted evidence on the card that helped them infer how the character was feeling in that instance.

After they marked their evidence, they sorted the cards into different headers of the emotions. Students used their lists for this, too, to help them think of different ways to describe how the character felt in the card. Rather than always saying, "The character was angry," they learned words like "furious," or "upset."
 

We also have students gather clues during shared reading. During our reading of Wolf, students recorded evidence and made inferences about the wolf's emotions.

 

Grab these ideas in my Character Emotions Unit    and my 41 Characters Analysis Tools.  

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Using clues to identify the author's purpose

 I really have a thing for sorts. There's something about the way kids have to read closely, and say, "No, this is not that same as that. This belongs there," that makes me feel like they're getting it!

While I was working with some struggling readers in fifth grade, I noticed that they didn't really have an understanding that authors have a specific purpose for the way they write. They include different types of language and details based on their purpose. To help them solidify their understanding, I pulled out this Author's Purpose Sort.

 Before I handed out the cards, we built the top part of this anchor chart. We focused on the four main purposes and then we brainstormed the genres that each purpose would be suited to. I reviewed an explanation for each purpose as well.

 After making sure we were all on the same page, I handed out the cards. Each team of three had a set of eight cards with a few paragraphs on each card. There were enough cards in the short texts to ensure that students could make a good decision about the author's purpose.

Students sorted the cards into the four purposes, marking their evidence in pencil.

Then I had each group share one of their cards. They read the title of the card and stated their reason and which clues helped them decide on the purpose.

This activity helped us develop a common language for discussing author's purpose, and helped my kids understand that they can find clues if they read between the lines!

Grab this persuasive text freebie on TPT

and check out my Author's Purpose Pack for the sorting activity, too!

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Pirate Family Literacy Night

Arrr you ready for Pirate Family Literacy Night?    Ha! I crack myself up. Every year we host our families for a fun night of reading and writing activities in a theme.    Pirates is a fun theme with tons of possibilities.   I mean, think about it. There are hook hands and peglegs and  ships with huge sails.    There are treasure maps and jewels and deserted islands.   You can say Arrrrr! a lot, and wear scarves and hats. What's not to like?   So how do you put together a family literacy night, a la pirate?   Well, here you go!   About a month before Literacy Night, I start the planning. I figure out what stations I'm going to have, what materials I need to make and copy.    I also find out who will be able to help out at a station or at the front of the school.   

Event planning form from my Instructional Coaching MegaPack

I cut, stack, and laminate (or I have the lovely volunteers at our school help with it.)   About a week before Literacy Night, I start putting samples and materials together. I go shopping and buy everything we need. I put together the bags for the door (including a bookmark and a reading pledge). I talk to our librarian to make sure we're ready with the free books we give away - one to each child. And I put together the snack station.    This year's snack was this adorable craft:  

  To make it, I stuffed plastic snack-sized bags with a popsicle stick (for spreading frosting), a mini chocolate doughnut, a pretzel stick, and a handful of goldfish. I also cut up little pieces of white paper for the sail and purchased the little paper plates and frosting.  

I downloaded How I Became a Pirate to play in the background while the kids were working on their snack.

At the front door, our librarian handed out books to our kids!

This was the Treasure Map station: a fun word family game. Kids made the pieces by cutting them out of yardstick and then put them in a paper bag. The kids and parents took turns drawing cards to fill up their treasure maps!

Kids and parents read these fun pirate partner plays with their hats and hooks on!

This was our reading station: Pirate Cove. We set up comfy chairs and spots to sit and read and provided baskets of books. Our super art teacher made this ship, too!

This station was a huge hit: Digging for Buried Treasure. I took two plastic wading pools and had some helpers fill them with balled-up butcher paper in yellow and brown (to represent sand).

Then I copied these gems and coins on cardstock and mixed them up in the paper balls.

Teachers read a card  with a prefix (at the big kids station) or a rhyming word (at the little kids station) and kids dug through the pools to find the matching words!

At the last station, kids wrote adorable stories about how they became pirates and then they made a paper plate pirate!

 

 

Want to learn more? Check out my How to Plan an Awesome Family Night video!

 

  Looking for fun pirate ideas? Check out my Pirate Theme Pinterest Board full of pirate inspiration.    You can get everything you need to run your own fun pirate family night at TPT! And now it's available in English and in Spanish!  

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Structures and elements of dramas and plays *Freebie!

Do you spend much time on drama? Like, after PE or lunch?

Hahahaha I am cracking myself up.

Well, obviously, that's not the kind I'm talking about. For the past two weeks, I've been working in some fourth grade classrooms.

Our current unit in reading is drama: plays. We've been working on the structures unique to dramatic literature (cast of characters, stage directions, scenes, etc.), and making inferences to describe the characters in dramas. 

And it's been so much fun!

We started out by introducing the various structures of drama and just finding examples in a dramatic text.

We used Storyworks by Scholastic. There aren't a ton of stage directions at the beginning of each scene, but they're engaging plays for kids. 

These are the structures we introduced. For each one, we had students practice a gesture to help them remember the meaning. For example, the gesture for "dialogue" is to place your open hand on your mouth and move it away from your mouth to show the lines the characters say. These gestures helped students recall the meaning of the structures.

The second day, we started out by identifying the genre (again). It's so important for kids to practice identifying the genre of a text and think about how that will impact their reading - the strongest readers change the way they read a text based on the genre. That's why teaching reading by genre is so important!

We used our genre cards on rings to identify the genre and then I gave each student about ten tiny post-its. They had five minutes to hunt through the genre and identify the structures we introduced the day before.

After the kids hunted through their dramas and labeled the structures they could find, I handed out this table. You can download it for free from Google Docs. It includes the main structures of drama and the definition. As we read, we tried to explain how that dramatic structure helped us as a reader and filled in the third column.

The next few days, we worked on describing characters in drama using their words (dialogue), actions (stage directions) and what other characters said about them (others' dialogue). To do this, we used one of the sheets from my Scaffolded Reading Responses for Drama and Plays.

Students collected details about the main character in the play, named Felipe. They noticed his dialogue (he often told lies), the stage directions (he whined, stomped his feet, and crossed his fingers behind his back when he made a promise), and what other characters said about him (his servants didn't have a very good opinion of him).

Then students used the sentence starters in the middle of the page to write a response using their evidence. Students were able to write about the character using specific details from the text and make accurate inferences. It was a good start in helping students understand dramas and plays!

For more ideas about teaching dramas and plays, check out my Teaching Drama pinterest board here.

 

Grab my Scaffolded Reading Responses for Drama and Plays on TPT!

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Responding to Reading: Responding to Questions *Freebie!

One question teachers frequently ask is, "How can I monitor my students' understanding during a read aloud or shared reading?" Sometimes, it's enough just to see what kinds of thoughts students are having as they read. Sometimes, though, I need to see a specific response to a purpose question. After playing with a few ideas, I tried out this reader's notebook strategy for having students respond in a focused way to our read aloud or shared reading. The strategy is: question strips!

Before we read a section of text in class, I would read it myself and write a question or two that I thought might help students evaluate their thinking. I used question stems from our state assessment and other rigorous sources, in order to build students' familiarity to the questions' syntax.

I typed these questions up, and copied them until I had a series of them running down the page. I can usually fit 12 or so on one page. I printed them out (it often only took two sheets to get enough for each student in my class to have one) and then I cut them into strips.

After our shared reading or read aloud (in this case, Esperanza Rising was our shared reading, so everyone had a copy - great for citing evidence from the text), I handed out one question strip to each student. They took a glue stick and quickly zipped it across the page, and then stuck the strip on.
 

I modeled, modeled, modeled how to write a simple but complete response to the question. After modeling for oh, about forever, my students were able to write coherent and accurate responses to the questions. I wrote questions about characterization, inferences, and personal connections for students to respond to. It was great insight into my students' understanding!

  Check out these posts about other ways to use Reader's Notebooks to respond to reading! Monitoring comprehension Writing book letters Double-entry journals Writing about characters Responding to questions And for more ideas, check out "Responding to Reading," a freebie on TPT!

Or my new Scaffolded Reading Responses for Fiction!

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