Great Literacy Resources

Great Literacy Resources

When the Division One teachers did the RSST training with Lana earlier this year she shared The Florida Center for Reading Research site. It is full of amazing, high-quality literacy resources. There's great phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, and comprehension activities and resources on it for grades K-5 (I'm assuming it largely aligns with the Common Core, so I'm sure grade six will find these really useful, too). 

Check it out for some great Guided Reading and other activities! 

http://www.fcrr.org/resources/resources_sca_2-3.html

Word Wall Bingo

Today in class we played "Word Wall Bingo". The kids absolutely loved it! For the rest of the day they asked me when we would play again. This idea would work in various grades with any type of word wall. First I gave the students blank bingo cards and instructed them to fill in each blank space with words from the wall. I gave them specific word families to choose from, but you could  modify this based on your grade and the type of word wall you use. We then played bingo with the cards that the students had created! The students enjoyed that they had a part in creating the game and were extremely engaged throughout this lesson.

Reading Blog

One thing I have introduced in my classroom this year is a book blog. After reading a particularly good book, students are encouraged to write about it on our class reading blog to share the book with the world. When a student posts, I will often tweet out the link to get visitors to our site. The kids LOVE to see how many people have visited. This establishes a sense of authentic audience for students, and encourages them to improve their writing, since they never know who is reading it. It is also a good opportunity to discuss how to write about the book without spoiling it for the reader. 

I created the blog on Weebly, as I find it really easy to use for the kids with the drag and drop options. If you want to check out their book posts, the address is:

 http://6breadingadventures.weebly.com/

Bookopoly

I have been on a bit of a gamification kick lately, especially since I am just finishing up a big inquiry project on the topic for my course right now. If you are interested in reading more about gamification, this is a link to a bunch of articles I collected during my research:
https://www.diigo.com/outliner/7fthyf/Gamification?key=btmqbfhx0

My latest creation is a board game that I have dubbed Bookopoly (which apparently is actually a thing...so much for being creative!) As you might notice, it is designed to look like the classic game of Monopoly.  My students have been struggling with their AR reading this year, and it has been really hard to motivate them to read their books. Hopefully engaging them in a fun game will help kick their reading into high gear! One important aspect of this game is that it is designed to allow students of all reading levels to be successful!

Click on me to see the property tile template

On my Bookopoly board, each property tile is named after a location in a kids book (well, mostly anyway!), and has a specific XP value assigned to it. Just like Monopoly, they get more expensive as you go around the board. The idea is that students will earn XP points by doing different reading tasks, and then will be able to buy properties on the board with their XP points. They can also upgrade their properties by purchasing houses and castles. To make it even more fun, students will also try to earn a variety of badges. Badges can be earned for a bunch of different achievements, from reading a graphic novel to buying your first house. 

The descriptions of the badges can be found here if you are interested. 

Below is a table of achievements and the corresponding XP points students can earn. 

But of course, there has to be some way to track the XP points that students are earning and spending, so welcome Math outcomes into the equation! Students will be responsible for tracking their income and spending on a sheet, pictured below, keeping a running total of the amount of XP they currently hold. 

Students will be given a booklet that includes sheets to record their properties, collect their badges, as well as their XP bank logs. Hopefully this helps with our AR issues this year!!!

Candy Corn Contest

Here's a great October reading activity! The "Candy Corn Contest" is a book about a boy who is trying to win a jar of candy corn from his teacher by guessing how many candies are in the jar. In the book the students get to enter guesses when they read a page from their library books. I read the book to my students, and then have them answer comprehension questions about each chapter. For each question they enter correctly, they get to enter an estimate into the draw. Whoever guesses the correct amount (or the closest) wins the jar of candy! 

Coming soon to a library near you!

I So, I was looking at Twitter the other day...

And I came across a really great article on Edsurge https://www.edsurge.com/news/2014-12-14-using-audioboom-in-the-classroom-to-improve-reading-fluency. 

The author discussed how they used an app called audioboom to improve student fluency by having them record books. I loved the idea, and so now the grade sixes are embarking on a quest! Over the course of the school year, you will start to see QR code appearing inside the back cover of the library books. When scanned on an iPad, students will be brought to an audio recording of the book being read. Grade six students will be recording the audio to help them practice their fluency and expression. 

The reason we have decided to start creating audio recordings of the books is so that some of the lower students in our classrooms might still be able to listen to the book if there is no one available to read with them that day. All they will need is an ipad with a QR scan app and their headphones. Also, we know that Daily 5/CAFE has students listening to reading as a part of it, and that many of our Div I classes are using this program. Right now, we are going to be focusing on books at the 1-2 levels, and then working up from there. 

So, keep your eyes posted for these books! When students record a new audio book, they will be our database on our Google Site. This is where we will be keeping track of the titles we have recorded. The link is below

 https://sites.google.com/a/sperd.ca/aesbookproject/. 

PS: If you happen to have a title in your room that we have done a recording for, feel free to print of the QR code and tape it in your book as well! 

P.S.S. Teachers if you are interested in having your kids record audiobooks, let me know and I can show you how to do it and give you access to the folders etc. The more the merrier!! 

Our Grade 4 Word Wall

Our Grade 4 Word Wall.

Last year I tried using a regular word wall, but I wasn't using it regularly. This year I decided to try something new. We are using a word wall that focuses on word families.

We pick a common sound like "ight" and as a class come up with words that would fit into this family. The kids are pretty good at creating the words when they have the sound. We come up with eight and then pick two words to focus on. We define them and then the students are responsible for creating a sentence using the word. This also helps review proper sentence structure.