Do you have reading pals? Interactive Notebooks for Reading Pals...Summer Stock Up on this perfect tool!

Each year my sixth graders are teamed up with the first graders as a way to connect our diverse groups of learners.  The idea began about six years ago when I realized that many of my sixth graders needed practice to enhance fluency, and my first grade teaching pal, Mrs. Eshman, had students that really needed practice listening to reading.  We decided it was the perfect match!  We brought the students to the cafeteria with books in hand, paired them up, and prepared for them to sit together and read.

My 6th graders have always loved reading with their reading buddies.  It is a treat each week to see a special little person that looks just as forward to spending time with them.   For the first few weeks it is a novelty and everyone seems to be on their best behavior, but as the first weeks of school turn into months, focus eases up and merely reading is no longer an activity that keeps everyone’s attention. 

Over the last few years I have found that the reading time seems to go very quickly and my sixth graders are trying to find the best way to fill up the rest of their time.  The little ones can get off task easily, which can be a challenge for my sixth graders to manage.  In addition, my sixth graders that are supposed to be the role models can have issues of their own at times.  Despite teacher re-direction, the time wasn’t being utilized the way we had envisioned.

After one week of far too much re-focusing of our students, we began planning and coordinating what was read from that point on.  It was ideal.  The sixth graders were armed with more than a book, and wanted to take ownership over not just reading, but also helping their first grade pal develop a skill.

Teachers are busy and have minimal time for extras, and so this interactive notebook was born.  Instead of having to plan each week for reading pals, this is the tool that will allow your older and younger students to thrive when working together.  The work is done for you!  Simply print, grab student book boxes/baskets, cut, glue, and go!  Your students will be more than excited to work together and there is enough fun to keep your reading pals engaged.  There is nothing like seeing the older students guiding the younger learners.

Check out this tool in action and grab this sampler...any summer time you had scheduled to plan for reading pals is no longer needed.  Grab this sampler and get back to some fun in the sun!

Here is a pic of one of the activities that helps the old pal and younger pal get to know each other.  It leads into the perfect tool to enhance understanding of compare and contrast and Venn diagrams.

Here is the entire Reading Pals Interactive Notebook Tool Kit for Grades 1-6.

May the 4th be with you...My Top 4 Novel Units

In the teaching world it can feel like you are standing on an island at times.  Despite all of the work that happens in the classroom, the interactions you have with other teacher and staff during the course of a day, and the numerous meetings attended each day, it can sometimes feel like we are fighting an uphill battle all by ourselves.  

As the only 6th grade reading and language arts teacher in my building I am at a loss at times to find the perfect learning tools for my students.  One size does not fit all in my situation, and our Reading Street 6th Grade Level resource is not always the perfect tool for teaching my learners.  With students at such diverse levels-believe it or not-from kindergarten-tenth grade level, I have quite a span of readers. 

What's a reading teacher to do, but work to find the tools or MAKE them in order to make sure everyone is learning and growing.  So that is what I do!

Novel units are a huge part of my instruction.  While I do utilize Reading Street, I do believe that students need to read WHOLE texts and NOVELS.  I can honestly say that there are some students that arrive in my classroom is the fall and have never read an entire novel cover to cover by themselves.  I take this sad reality, and turn it into a positive goal.  In order to make ensure my students leave me as better readers, I help them find texts that they won't want to put down and help them to navigate them successfully.

A few novel units I have created for my students have become hits with others on my TpT store.  In fact, my top selling four products are novel units.  I want to share them with you today.  Each unit is common core aligned and comes with an answer key in order to make your life as easy as possible as a teacher...something we all need.  Take a look below at how I utilize each of these tried and true tools with my 6th grade learners...

     

Crash by Jerry Spinelli is the novel I love to begin the school year with in order to model a few of the different elements of the Daily 5-listen to reading when I read aloud, read to someone for partner read, and read to self when reading independently.  Because it is a high-interest, realistic fiction text that my students connect with so well, it is one that they can't seem to get enough of reading.  In addition, a theme of the novel is bullying, which I believe to be a perfect issue to tackle right at the start of the year.  The rich discussion that comes from this novel is incredible.  I find that students think some of the bullying in the beginning of the novel by Crash toward Penn is humorous, but by the end, no one is laughing when Penn is getting mistreated by Mike DeLuca.  Lastly, this novel makes it easy to enhance student understanding of setting, point of view, antagonist vs. protagonist, and flashback.

How do I utilize these novels? I make each student their own novel folder with the novel unit inside.  We do share books because I teach 60+ students and only have 22 novels.  This is one that I bought for my classroom library, but the public library does have a teacher collection that can be reserved. The chapters are incredibly short in this novel, so I will always read aloud at least one chapter each day.  We will answer a few of the novel unit questions and engage in discussion about what has been read.  Next, the students will partner read or work independently on the remaining chapters and corresponding questions assigned for the day.  I will also pull students in small groups and work with those that might need more assistance.

I created the Chocolate Fever and The Boxcar Children novel units for my intervention crew this past school year.  They were 6th graders that were eager to achieve as learners, but struggling readers.  I wanted them to have success with high-interest novels that they would enjoy reading.  also, it is imperative that students have success reading complete novels.  Both of these texts made that happen for my intervention students.  Each of these units were incredibly well-received. 

 

My intervention group read 3 more of The Boxcar Children novels after tackling this one.  Many of the students in that group had never read a mystery and loved trying to infer how things would turn out.  They loved reading these novels aloud, which really improved their fluency.  In addition, our discussions were terrific.  If you are looking for books to read with upper elementary intervention kiddos, this is the perfect series.

I am a Jerry Spinelli fanatic.  I just adore the novels he writes because I feel they really make an impact on my male readers.  His main characters tend to be boys dealing with various issues of which my male students can relate.  Wringer is the same way as Crash, but deals with peer pressure and how we sometimes go along with something just because others are, not because we agree.  Palmer LaRue really battles that in this novel with the idea of having to become a wringer.  Like Crash, this novel makes it easy to enhance student understanding of setting, point of view, and flashback.

If you are looking to enhance your classroom library, these are perfect books for your upper elementary students!  Grab these discounted novel units to save you some planning time and money!

Happy Reading!

Reading Intervention Tools-What to do when everyone isn't reading on grade-level...

Teaching is profession that is tricky in so many ways!  Understatement, I know!

In addition to all of the RTI, MAP data, DRA, and DIBELs work we do, most importantly we need tools to teach our students!  Once all student data is placed into our hands, we are faced with the WHAT NEXT?!?!

Once data came to our team last school year, we did an overhaul with our students.  We rearranged students into classrooms that would benefit them as much as possible, in addition allow us to provide the most support to the students that were most in need.

For me this meant I had two classes of MOSTLY on-grade level readers, but a group of 12 that ranged from kindergarten level to fourth grade reading level.  Clearly working in our Reading Street text and reading novels like Crash by Jerry Spinelli and Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins was not going to be effective with this group!

So, what did I do?

Spelling lists were modified from 25 words to 5-10 words, writing tasks were still taking place, but instead of focusing on complete essays and multiple page narratives, we focused on sentence and paragraph structure, and I began finding high-interest books on their level to read in our reading groups.

I headed to the book room to find books that we had multiple copies of and I READ and READ and READ in order to come up with reader response questions that could go along with these books.  My goal was to help these struggling readers LOVE reading by finding books they could read and connect with.

Some read alouds I used were: Chocolate Fever and Frindle.

Reading group texts for the two different groups were: The Boxcar Children series and the Young Cam Jansen series.  If you are wanting to utilize these tools with your readers, I have posted them in my Teacher Pay Teachers store.  I can attest that they are tried and true and my students made tremendous gains as readers last year.

 

It is a challenging process to move struggling readers in the middle grades, but when gains are made, it is such a thrill!  Best of luck in your classrooms, keep moving those mountains!