Read Alouds in Middle School

As I was getting ready to move up from grades 4-5 to grades 7-8, I had to make some plans to adjust some of my teaching approaches to older students.  One aspect that I love about teaching Language Arts is reading aloud to kids.  Reading great books aloud to kids does so many wonderful things.  You get to model fluency, and it gives you room to discuss all of the elements of literature and reading strategies.

With elementary students, I usually used a mix of novels and picture books for read alouds.  As I was planning for middle school, I remembered a presenter from a workshop I went to years ago.  It was a workshop on balanced literacy.  The presenter was a middle school teacher who said she read the first part of a different novel to her students every week.  If they wanted to know what happened next, they had to pick up the book and read.

After thinking about it, I decided to try this for this year with my 7th and 8th graders.  Every week I will read the first couple chapters of a different book to them.  Occasionally, we may choose to read an entire novel all together.  Reading a couple chapters gives enough plot to discuss characters, plot, literary elements, good introductions to writing, etc.  It also is a fabulous way to introduce kids to different genres and hopefully get them excited about reading. I will have my students record different concepts in their language arts notebook as we read.  We will use some foldables and some just drawing different graphic organizers.

What we have read so far this year:

1. Wonder

The first week of school, we read Wonder by RJ Palacio.  We discussed what makes all of us unique an also how we want to be perceived by others.  I had them write their first essay of the year on how they wanted others to perceive them.

2. If I Stay

Then, we read the first couple chapters of If I Stay.  I won't always choose books that are movies, but I know a lot of times the kids are interested in the books that are movies.  For If I Stay, we discussed the differences between external and internal conflict.

3. The Maze Runner

When we started reading The Maze Runner, this is when I really saw my plan come to life.  The kids were so intrigued with the story from the first two chapters, they voted unanimously to have us read the entire book. I happened to have the audiobook on my iPad, so we are listening to the audio version of the book for about 30 minutes per day.  Of course, some of them went out and saw the movie.  I had a few rush out and buy the book and read it right away.  Some have started the second book.  Ultimately, it got many of them excited about reading.

During the first two chapters, I had my students write down descriptions of the setting and also listen for new words and guess their meanings using context clues.  The boys in the glade have a very interesting set of slang words, but it is a great demonstration of using context clues to determine meanings of words. As we are listening to the audio book, I will have them do some tasks in their notebooks, but most of the time we will listen just for pleasure. We will also probably do some writing assignments using the novel.

How do you use read alouds in middle school?

What We Have Been Up to in Reading

The last two weeks have been crazy as we have been trying to get back into a routine.  Each day we have seen progress, and things have become calmer and more productive.

For our read aloud novel, last week we began reading The One and Only Ivan.

We have been talking a lot about theme and point of view.  I felt this was a great novel to apply both of those concepts.  The book is written in first-person from the point of view of a gorilla.  The chapters are short, which really allows you a lot of freedom to decide where to pause and how much to read each day.  I always like to stop at the end of a chapter, so I try to choose read aloud novels with shorter chapters (or at least no more than 10-15 pages per chapter).  This book has a lot of great imagery, figurative language, and sentences with idiomatic or metaphoric meanings.  We have had some good discussions on what the Ivan means when he says certain phrases.

For our independent reading, we also decided to start using www.kidblog.org for our reading responses.  We began using last week, and the kids are loving blogging and being able to comment on each other's posts.  For right now, they are just writing one paragraph.  I want to build up to writing longer reading response weekly entries and use Kidblog as the format to share these,  Because of the commenting feature, it would also be a fun way to publish essays and stories.  We could share without having to stand at the front of the room and read them.

We also have been talking some about idioms this week.  We completed this activity by ReadWriteThink to practice idioms.  It is an interactive way to practice idioms.  I did not have them turn it in.  We just practice it for fun.

Sumdog Math Games and Read Write Think Online Interactive Graphic Organizers

The new technology resources we tried today:

Sumdog

I had seen lots of bloggers recommending Sumdog. I wanted to try it out.  I created an account awhile ago, but had not implemented it in my classroom yet.  My students love it!  They are begging to play at lunch and at recess.

With so many levels of Math, I like that I can differentiate this for my students.  After you add your students, class, and add a challenge.  Within the challenge, you can edit the skills by student.  I have some students working on 4th grade skills, some on 5th grade, and some on 6th grade.  They loved being able to earn coins, change their avatar, and play against each other.  They all want to be the top of the leader board.

Essay Organizer

I love Read Write Think.  Here is a link to all of their interactive graphic organizers.  There are 59 of them.  We tried two of them today.  Since we have computers, I am trying to find resources that they can use that help us achieve things we need to accomplish.  We are writing informative essays about the Olympic biographies we read.  We had tried organizing our 5 paragraph essays on paper with a graphic organizer I made. Some of my students understood it and some were not making much progress. I decided to try Read Write Think's Essay organizer.

Oh my gosh.  It made a world of difference for some.  The depth of clicking through the process seemed to help them a lot with the thought process.  Interactive made a huge difference for some of them. After they make the organizer, they can save it and even email it directly to the teacher.  So after they emailed it to me, I printed it out for them.

Story Cube

We read the first story from the 7 Habits for Happy Kids about being proactive.  Sammy the Squirrel has to learn how he can be proactive to take care of his own boredom.  We made the Story Cube for Sammy the Squirrel reviewing the character, setting, problem, resolution, theme, and favorite part of the story.

I made them answer in complete sentences.  They saved the story cubes and emailed them to me from the website.  I printed them out, and they made the cubes. One activity worked on story plot skills, understanding theme, web skills, writing in complete sentences, and the motor skills to actually cut, glue, and make the cube.

Overall, we had a great day!  How do you use Read Write Think?  Any other interactive graphic organizers you love?  Do you have any great suggestions for building online quizzes for short answer questions besides Google Docs?

Activities for Talk Like a Pirate Day and the book How I Became a Pirate

So I was going to go to bed two hours ago and then I remembered tomorrow is International Talk Like a Pirate Day.  I had almost forgotten.  I got some nonfiction pirate books at the library and a "How to Draw Pirates" book over a week ago.

I had seen several other bloggers recommend How I Became a Pirate by Melinda Long.  I saw the library also had Pirates Don't Change Diapers. I checked them out and read them tonight.  They are super cute.

So I made a set of activities to go with the book for my students tomorrow. It includes ten pages of reading, writing, grammar, math, and project activities. You can get it at my TpT store here.  It will normally be $3.50, but this week it is on sale for $2.00.  First person to comment and tell me your plans for International Talk Like a Pirate Day gets a copy free.

Included:

vStory map

vSequence of events chart

vChart to think about Lessons Jeremy Jacob learned about being a pirate

vPirate nouns and verbs

vPirate writing prompts

vPirate word problem creation assignment

vAssignment on What Pirates Don’t Do

vTranslating pirate vocabulary

vTic-tac-toe activity menu with assignment ideas

 

 

Good Reads

I am linking up with Mrs. Stanford for her Good Reads linky party.  I think I am just as addicted to linky parties as teaching blogs.  They are so much fun! 



Hmmm...what do I plan on reading this summer?  Well, my grandmom always says there should be two books on your nightstand: one for fun and one to learn.

To Learn:
I want to reread some education books I read awhile ago.  Someone told me about Everyday Editing at a workshop, so I bought it.  I only glanced through it.  I never really digested it.  This summer I want to work on creating some good upper elementary grammar practice materials.


Practice with Purpose always gives me ideas when I read through it.

I want to study different periods of American History by how it affected children.  I am starting with the Civil War.  I skimmed both of these 2 summers ago, but this summer I want to really read them.

I have always heard how good the Book Whisperer is, so I would like to read it.

Heather at Heather's Heart has been blogging about Conscious Discipline so I might look into that.
For Fun:

I picked up these two at the library.  They looked interesting.  I always have to keep up with juvenile and young adult novels.

One of these days I would like to get around to reading Gregor the Overlander by Suzanne Collins.

My husband will give me a hard time if I don't read these two and keep with the series. 

After skimming everyone's reading choices for the summer via the linky party, I now also have added Mosaic of Thought (which was given to me and I never read).  I am considering Fifty Shades of Grey (I am curious to see what all the controversy is.  Although, some have indicated it is not very well-written, so I may not get very far.)

Let's see if I can read all this in one summer!  I tend to hardly read at all for months and then consume books for awhile. I also am continuously working on 1000 Gifts by Ann Voskamp and my own gratitude list.  I also am trying to read and study the Bible more.

On a side note, if you are looking for some Reading Resources for your classroom,  I made some common core aligned Reading Graphic Organizers for 3rd grade and 5th grade. I am currently working on 4th grade.

Here is a summer reading log freebie for you.  I made this in case you wanted something simple to send home for accountability, but with minimal copying.

Happy reading!

Reading Skills - Setting

So when I first read Laura Candler's new book on Graphic Organizers, I was really impressed. I loved the way she explained how to teach Reading minilessons with the Gradual Release Model. I really struggled with trying to fit in an "I do," "we do," and "you do" all in one 20 minute mini-lesson. My lessons always went too long or we didn't get through it all. Her suggestion is to spread the Gradual Release Model over 3 days of mini-lessons. This seems simple, but I never thought of it. Here is the link to check out her book on graphic organizers. I would absolutely recommend it to any teacher.

http://www.lauracandler.com/books/graphicorganizers.php

So her book inspired me to want to create a set of mini-lessons and activities with this formula of completing the mini-lessons over 3 days instead of trying to do it all one day. I want to create sets of minilessons and activities over the basic reading skills that could be used with any picture book or novel as read aloud.

My first set of minilessons and activities is on my Teachers Pay Teachers store for Free. I started with Setting and Plot Structure because I like to start a new read aloud novel by discussing setting. There are detailed minilessons, journal warmup suggestions, anchor chart suggestions, homework ideas, and a Guided Reading handout.

http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Reading-Mini-lessons-and-activities-Setting-Plot-Structure