Fellow teachers, I am participating in a HUGE Teachers Pay Teachers Resource Giveaway hosted by Teaching High School Math. The giveaway is divided into two parts, and you have the opportunity to win either a Middle School Giveaway Bundle or a High School Giveaway Bundle. These bundles are filled with the highest-quality resources from all subject areas, donated by TOP Teachers Pay Teachers sellers.
Summarizing is such a difficult skill for students.
This is a 2-week mini-unit on summarizing and finding the main idea (called finding the GIST) with expository text. I have used this in my classroom for the past 5 years, and students find this worksheet exceedingly helpful in scaffolding their acquisition of this difficult skill. The best part about this unit plan is that you get to choose your own texts, individualized for your own students’ interests and reading levels. I suggest using news articles (especially student news publications), but you can also use content-area texts, websites, textbooks, nonfiction books, etc. The sky is the limit!
This unit includes *TWO* sample articles and summaries to review and discuss with students. One article shows a shorter, 20 word summary, and the other shows a more detailed 30 word summary. Choose which is best for your students!
This meets the Common Core Standards for grades 6-12, and it is a cross-curricular activity.
Includes:
* Common Core Standards Addressed
* Learning Targets
* Lesson Plans
* Worksheets
* 2 Sample Articles
* 2 Sample Summaries
* Student Handout: A Shorter Way To Say…
* Feedback Oreo Poster (How to give constructive criticism)
Happy Returns from Winter Break! Week 18 was a short one due to 2 Cold Days, but I will share the highlights nonetheless!
1. Annual Mother-Daughter Chicago Weekend – For the past 19 years, we have had an annual Mother-Daughter Shopping Trip to Chicago. By we I mean my mother, my sister, my mom’s best friend, her daughter, and myself. We get a suite near the Magnificent Mile and spend the weekend shopping, dining, and laughing. We always go right after Christmas to hit up the best sales. I so look forward to this (and save up for this!) every year! Pictured above: The snowy, freezing Magnificent Mile (a little weather never stopped us!), the inside of the Bloomingdale’s Building, Garrett’s Popcorn (a MUST if you’re visiting Chicago), The 5 of us dining at Tavernita, and my favorite purchase of the weekend (on sale at Banana Republic for only $12!).
2. Cold Days – How can this NOT be a highlight? We got TWO Cold Days this week! I stayed warm inside in my jammies, playing with the dogs, baking treats, and working on my dissertation. What a wonderful gift!
4. Frog Hunt – Look closely at the pictures above. Do you see the hidden frogs (Hint: There are 3!)? Every year, as part of the 7th grade Science curriculum, our students learn about animal adaptations. One of their projects is to try and hide a frog in plain sight throughout the school by camouflaging the frog’s color. Some are very obvious, and some are very tricky and well-hidden! To incorporate technology this year, the brilliant Science teachers first had the students scout the school and take a photograph of the ‘environment’ where they wanted to place their frog. Back in the classroom, they could color match to their photograph. Isn’t this a great project? I look forward to it every year, as it really adds excitement in the hallways!
5. This Awesome Poster – Doesn’t this just say it all? I love it!
So how was your week? Did you get a Cold/Snow day?
Yeah! I am the Featured Teacher this week over on Lindsay Perro’s Blog! I feel so lucky and blessed! Please go check out her blog – she is a Top Seller on Teachers Pay Teachers, and she has so many fun and exciting math resources to help your class go ‘Beyond the Worksheet!’
Have you read the novel Spite Fences? I didn’t think so. It is a wonderful novel for 8th through *9th graders, but it is so often overlooked! (*Note: Scholastic says that this novel is geared for 6-8th grade interest levels, but I disagree based on the content and figurative language). I have been teaching this novel unit for the past 7 years, and I always see a tremendous amount of growth in my students – I just love this unit, and it is the perfect way to end our 8th grade year! We find so many ways to make cross-curricular connections between Language Arts and Social Studies with this unit.
The novel is about a 13-year old girl named Maggie Pugh who lives in a small Georgian town in the 1960s. She is poor, white, and the victim of abuse from her mother and next-door neighbor. She is at the age where she begins to notice things – facilitated by the gift of a camera to help her ‘see the world’ – and she questions the segregation and customs in her town. Because this novel is historical fiction, it is filled with references to important Civil Rights Era people and events. Since Maggie is a very bright young girl, and also a bit of a tomboy, my students don’t view this as a ‘girl’ book – in fact, my boys really love it and demonstrate much growth in their critical evaluation skills while reading/discussing this novel.
The magic of this novel is that it is the perfect piece to help students begin to discover figurative language. Spite Fences is rife with challenging language and thought-provoking questions about morals and real-world conflicts. It investigates important themes of human rights, dignity, faith, coming of age, and staying true to one’s beliefs. My students become outraged by many of the events, and we have very lively classroom discussions. There are so many subtle hints and hidden treasures that only a discerning, critical reader will catch. When I point out that the ‘fence’ represents oh-so-much-more than just a wooden structure, and that it is 6 feet tall, made of pine (::cough:: casket ::cough::) the students are mesmerized by the layers of depth and meaning.
My only lament is that this novel is no longer in print, but can be purchased second-hand or as an ebook. I still have paperback copies that I plan to use until they fall apart!
I have posted this unit in my Teachers pay Teachers store to share, since I firmly believe it is the perfect novel to use with your 8th and 9th grade students to prepare them for more challenging contemporary literature. I’ve made the reading response worksheets so that a student could even guide themselves through the novel – it would be a great option for an independent reader or a homeschooler as well. The unit spans 2 months, which is an entire quarter in my curriculum. The unit includes a prior knowledge activity – a movie guide for the film “A Time for Justice.”
This powerful 1994 documentary brings the Civil Rights movement to life and helps set the stage for this historical fiction. The best part is – you can order this kit (DVD + Lesson Plans) for FREE!
The Spite Fences Unit also includes a chapter-by-chapter reading guide with questions that range in type and complexity from inference to critical thinking, multiple choice, true/false, fill-in-the-blank, matching, and open-ended short answer questions. This unit is great for end of the year test prep by providing students with a wide range of possible reading response questions. An answer key is included.
While reading the novel, my students also complete a fun reading response project. They create an Altered Book (or Scrapbook) that includes 9 ‘pages’ or installations. What we do is find some old hardcover books to repurpose by glueing or writing new things into the pages.
These Altered Book page assignments are designed to illicit deep thinking and writing that require students to find evidence and dig deeper into the topics and themes of the novel (following Common Core language for text-based discussion). Each ‘page’ has a pre-writing, brainstorming page to help students collect their thoughts. Here are some examples of their work:
This entire Spite Fences Unit includes:
* Welcome letter with lesson plan outline
* Enduring Understandings and Common Core State Standards
* “A Time for Justice” documentary movie guide with answer key to help build prior knowledge
* Reading Guide with answer key
* Altered Book Project with samples, rubric, and planning pages
If you are interested in purchasing this unit, click here!
I can’t wait for 4th quarter to start our final unit of the year – my favorite!
As semester 1 comes to a close, I am gearing up for a new intervention group. I will get a group of about 7 students who are below grade level in reading (based on the MAP Measures of Academic Progress score). I will work with them twice a week for a half hour. As a small group, we will focus on improving our reading strategies and skills, as well as confidence with reading (a key component, in my opinion).
We will begin by having a frank discussion of why we are meeting as an intervention group. I want to empower my students, not make them feel like they are being ‘punished’ for an extra hour per week. I let them know that they have many strengths and skills, but sometimes we may need to brush up on one skill in particular or practice a skill until it become easier or more automatic. I make them feel special like we are in a top secret testing research group trying to figure out all of the tricks of the standardized tests (we discuss test-taking language and strategies as well). It’s important to me that they feel like part of a team when we meet, and that everyone enjoys working together. Let’s just say there is a lot of candy and bribery involved in the beginning.
An analogy I like to use with my struggling readers is that becoming a strong reader is sometimes like baking cookies – you can have all the best ingredients, but if you are missing one tiny item (like salt), the cookies just won’t work. It’s my job to help them realize that they have all those wonderful ingredients ready to go, and I help them find the missing ‘salt’ so that everything comes together. We aren’t starting from scratch, we’re just identifying and filling a tiny gap here or there.
On our first day, I will introduce them to this awesome new website I came across called Newsela. Newsela is self-described as, “an innovative way for students to build reading comprehension with non-fiction that’s always relevant: daily news.” Essentially, it is a news website that allows you to change the reading level of an article at the click of a button. I can upload my class roster and assign readings to my students, complete with a comprehension quiz at the end! And since we have iPads, the students can even annotate or take notes as they read the articles. If you peruse the website, you will see that they are all very high-interest stories. We are beginning with “Making a robot that flies like a jellyfish swims.”
The Lexile levels of the articles range from 630 to 1130. Below is a Lexile to grade level conversion chart reported on the Lexile website.
I can assign any student a different Lexile level based on his/her individual needs. I am going to start all of my students at the 630 level as we build rapport, confidence, and momentum. My goal is to have them reading independently at the 800 level before they are dismissed from interventions.
First, we will activate any prior knowledge students might have about jellyfish and/or robots, and we try to predict what they might have in common. Next, I will pre-teach only one important vocabulary word: imitate. We will scan the article and notice that it is divided into sections. We will read it out loud together as a group, and then decide what the main idea or key idea of the entire article was.
The next part of the lesson combines text-based reading strategies and the SQ3R method. It involves 2 different highlighter colors, let’s say pink (color #1) and blue (color #2). First, I will have the students highlight in pink (color #1) any sentences that they believe supports our main idea of the paragraph – supporting details. If our main idea is, ‘scientists are trying to invent flying robots that imitate jellyfish,’ then we will highlight in color #1 any ideas that help to explain how and/or why scientists are planning to accomplish this.
Next, we will turn each of the subsection titles into a question. For example, instead of “Very Simple Creatures,” we might ask, “Why are jellyfish considered very simple creatures?” Students will use their second color to highlight any sentences or key details in that subsection that helps them answer the question. The key here is that they are always looking for evidence in the text – it’s not just pulled out of nowhere. This plan also helps students to visually chunk the text into smaller manageable parts – a strategy they can easy enact with all of their reading.
So that is our plan to tackle non-fiction for a few weeks. I will slowly increase the Lexile level to test the waters and see how students fair with less and less guided support from me. I want to see these skills of activating prior knowledge, chunking text, and looking for main ideas with supporting evidence FROM the text, to become automatic. I have high hopes for these students, and I can’t wait to report back with their progress!
Happy 2014 to all! May your year be blessed with health and happiness.
I don’t make New Years Resolutions, but I do make year-long goals (is that the same thing?). I made 14 goals for 2014, and they are:
1. Finish my dissertation
2. Potty-train Ruffy (our dog)
3. Clean out / Organize the basement
4. Remodel the upstairs and get a new tenant
5. Save up and purchase an elliptical
6. Stick with the Paleo diet 90/10
7. Make a big dent in my student loans
8. Plant and eat my own vegetables / herbs
9. Create a family recipe book
10. Finish my handmade Christmas gifts by November
11. Use our wedding china
12. Go on at least one vacation
13. Go parasailing (I mean… why not?)
14. Cook an entire dinner for my family
Do you have any exciting plans or goals for 2014? I’d love to hear about them!
