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

Creating Book Trailers

After doing our reading groups, we were looking for a project to wrap up what the kids had learned.  In the fast finishers Jennine had developed, she had Book Trailers as one of the activities students could complete.  We decided to give it a try using books by Deborah Ellis.  Students were challenged to find images and words to represent the book without giving away too much.  They also had to think of which trailer template best suited their book.

First students took a look at the different templates to see which might work for the theme of their book.  They then went to this site to print a planning template.

http://learninginhand.com/blog/2014/8/6/plan-a-better-imovie-trailer-with-these-pdfs

 This is extremely important.  There is no question the kids could have quickly whipped off a movie, but this forced the students to think of powerful images that represented the book.

Students then used the iPads to search images and used iMovie to create their trailers.