Comprehension - Part #5. Questioning

Questioning involves students asking and answering questions about a text. I'm not talking about basic questions like "what colour was the house?". I'm talking about deeper questions like "I wonder why the character....".

To get students familiar with asking the deep questions, introduce the thinking stem "I wonder". This automatically lends itself to deeper questioning as it requires students to come up with a question where the answer is not immediately obvious.

When introducing this strategy with my year one class, I used the wordless text, Window by Jeannie Baker. Any wordless text would do, but I love Jeannie Baker books as there is always so much going on in every picture.

As we looked through each page, I gave students a post-it note and asked them to write down their "I wonder..." questions. I got responses such as;

"I wonder why the birds are flying away from the park"

"I wonder why the boy is playing inside and not outside"

We then shared our questions with the class, and used these questions to start a discussion and hopefully find an answer to them. For the question about the birds, one student suggested that the birds were flying away because trees were being chopped down to make room for the houses. Pretty awesome for a year 1 class right?

By providing students with a thinking stem, I helped scaffold their learning, as opposed to just telling them to come up with a question about the text.

Once we had this down, we moved on to other thinking stems that promote deep questions, such as

What would happen if?

Why would...

These stems work best with a rich text, simply use the same procedure as introducing the "I wonder..." questions.

After the introductory lesson/s implement deep questioning as part of your guided reading groups. These questions also link really well with any scientific investigation!

You can even set up an "I wonder..." wall in the classroom that can be used throughout the year.

I have a bunch of Comprehension resources in my store that are very useful for implementing the strategies in your classroom :)

Next up, Summarising!

Comprehension - Part #4. Making Connections

Making Connections is a great strategy to get students thinking about the text and how it is similar to themselves, another text or the world in which they live in. Making connections helps develop a deeper understanding of the text and the characters.

The easiest one to start with is Text-To-Self Connections.

To introduce this, I would pick a basic book that is about a situation that pretty much anyone can relate to. For the younger grades, any Charlie & Lola book is perfect. Before reading, tell students that you want them to listen to find a part of the book that is similar to their life. Read through the book and then have students talk with a partner about how they are similar to book/character.

Put up the prompt "This reminds me of..." on the board and have students use this to guide their answer for reporting back to the class.

In terms of bookwork, have students draw a picture and then write a sentence/paragraph about their connection. You can use the following sentence starters;

* This reminds me of...
* The character is like me because...
* I remember when...

Once students are comfortable with Text-To-Self connections, move onto Text-To-Text. Make the connection (ha!) between what they have just done and what they will be doing now (listening to connect). Good texts to use for this;

* The Gruffao and The Gruffalo's Child
* The Three Little Pigs and The True Story of the Three Little Pigs
*  The Stinky Cheeseman & Other Fairly Stupid Tales and any fairytale covered in the book
* Little Red Riding Hood and The Wolf's Story

Once again have students discuss and then write. This time use the sentence starters;

* The character _______ reminds me of ____________ in ________ because...
* The text ____________ reminds me of ___________ because...
* This story is like _______ because...

Teaching Text-To-Text connections provides a great starting block for comparing texts.

The last connection to teach is Text-To-World. Any text that is about a global issue would be fine. One of my favourites is George Saves the World by Lunchtime. This text is also great for reminding students about recycling and disposing of rubbish thoughtfully :D

Use these sentence starters to guide student responses;

* This reminds me of _________ because...
* This is like when....
* Something similar happened....

Once you have introduced these strategies, you can then use them as reading response activities. A great way to practice writing and encourage deeper thinking about what students have been reading!

I have a pack of posters and thinking stems in my TPT store that would be a perfect companion for teaching this strategy;

Next up: Questioning!

Comprehension - Part #3. Predicting.

Predicting is also an easy strategy to teach. Chances are, you are already doing it with your students, but the aim of this is to;

a) get your students to look closely at the clues in the text 

and 

b) get them to do it automatically, rather than have the teacher prompting all the time

To start off, define what predicting means. Explain that we predict before, during and after reading. Talk about what students can use to make a prediction; cover, titles, illustrations, blurb and text.

Pick a text and have students make a prediction. Give them the sentence starter "I predict". When they tell you their prediction, ask them why they think that. What clues from the text did they use? The sentence starter now becomes "I predict.....because.....".

You can use the above discussion for during reading predictions too.

As for after reading, the discussion turns to talking about what would happen if the author were to write a sequel. Students will use the events from the story to make this prediction. The sentence starter would be "I predict that......would happen next because.....". This can then turn into a writing task if you wish.

It is also important to confirm or reject predictions. That is, talking about whether they were right or wrong. Confirm or reject is just a more technical and nicer way of putting it. At this point, emphasise that it's totally okay if their predictions were rejected. Build up esteem by talking about how well they used the clues from the text :)

A neat way to set up this activity is to use three columns. My Prediction, What Happened and Confirm/Reject. The first two columns are pretty self explanatory, the confirm/reject can be completed with either a tick or a cross, or a C or a R.

If you want students to write about their predictions, here are some ideas;

1) Sentence starter "I predict" or "I predict....because..." Students can draw a picture to support their writing

2) Two columns. My Prediction and Clues From The Text

3) Have students predict what the characters will do, what the problem will be and how they will solve the problem.

My all time favourite activity is to stop reading just before the big ending. Have students write what they think will happen and draw a picture. Then read the ending and compare. It's one activity that the students absolutely love and it's pretty interesting seeing what they come out with.

That's pretty much it for predicting. If you are looking for some graphic organisers they can be found in my Super Six Activity Pack;

Next up in the series; Making Connections!

Five for Friday!

Linking up with Doodle Bugs Teaching for Five For Friday!

School - Friday was the last day of Term 3. I am now on holidays for 2 weeks! :D My plans? scootering, swimming, days out and resource making. I am keen to get back out on the scooter as it's been ages since we've been able to do it. Next term I officially start my contract! woo hoo!

TV - We got the TV we wanted! Now our lounge room has a brand new, 50', 3D, smart TV. It's awesome. I love it, especially watching movies in 3D. We watched the Lego Movie and it looked pretty cool especially when there was lots of movement. Of course watching that movie got the Everything is Awesome song stuck in my head, which lead to random outbursts of "everything is awesome!" over the past few days.

There are also other neat features with the TV, like the ability to go online, download apps or even tweet from the TV.

Resources - I've been pretty productive with my TPT store lately. I've made a few new things as well as made different designs for some of my most popular products. This morning I revamped my 2D Shapes pack because I felt like it should be more colourful. It wasn't ugly or anything, I just decided that rainbow paper would make it even better! (did I ever mention I was a perfectionist?). Click on the picture to see it in my store :)

Text Type and Purpose - This week one of the focus points of my reading groups was talking about the text type and author's purpose. I introduced the three types; Informative, Imaginative and Persuasive. We then talked about how we know which type it is, e.g. whether it was giving us facts, about a made up person or telling us why something is good. These three types then link to the author's purpose; inform, entertain or persuade. To help with these concepts I created a few posters.

Comprehension - In my reading groups we are also using the Super Six Comprehension strategies. We do a lot of discussion, which is great but then I want the students to be writing/recording ideas so the classroom teacher has a way to see what we have been doing. So to cater for this, I am using my Super Six Journal Prompts!

These are great because I simply need to print off one or two copies of a page, cut out the strips and then the students glue the prompt at the top of their page. They then complete the activity. So now when the teacher looks back in their book they will be able to easily see what the activity was :)

That wraps up my Five for Friday. Will work on the next part of my Comprehension series sometime in the first week of the holidays.

Enjoy your weekend!

Comprehension - Part #2. Visualising.

It's time for part 2 of my comprehension series!

Visualising

This is the easiest strategy to work on, so it's the best one to start with.

Introduce the strategy using a poster/PowerPoint/movie e.t.c. Find a text that has a description of a character, object or place. Texts that are good for this are; The Twits by Rhald Dahl, The Gruffalo by Julia Donaldson, The Gruffalo's Child by Julia Donaldson and Inside Mary Elizabeth's House by Pamela Allen.

Read with an emphasis on key features that you want the children to pick up on (i.e change your tone of voice). This will signal to students that they should pay attention to this feature for their visualisation. Of course, once students are more familiar with this strategy you will not need to alter your tone.

Depending on what age group you have, you can get students to label their drawing using words and phrases from the text that they used to create their visualisation. These labels can then be used to write sentences. Don't you just love it when everything links together? At the end, show students the picture in the book and have them make comparisons between their drawing, the book and their classmates' drawings.

Music is the perfect text for visualising scenery/setting. YouTube has lots of great clips for rainforest, oceans, cities and whatever else you want. Start off by playing the music, have students close their eyes and visualise the place. After the piece has finished, brainstorm a list of this that they heard and talk about what kind of place it would be. Students can either draw or create a mixed media artwork to represent their visualisation.

Another fun visualising activity is to read sections of a text and have students draw what is happening. You could even extend the activity and have each student visualise a different section, then put all the pictures together at the end to create a comic strip of the text.

Create a wall that teaches in your classroom by hanging up student work samples under posters/anchor charts. The students will love it, it will make your room look bright and colourful and it provides a visual reminder for student learning! 

If you are looking to do the Super Six in your classroom, I have a range of posters in my store. Click here to check out the Comprehension category.

I'm pretty proud of these posters. The backgrounds and borders were made by myself :D

Next strategy; Predicting!

Comprehension - Part #1

One of my favourite things to teach on a relief day is something related to comprehension. When I say comprehension I'm not talking about those 'read a passage and answer some basic questions' activities, I'm talking about metacognitive strategies.

One of the biggest impacts on my teaching was the 2 year long professional development program that I participated in while on year 1. The things I learned in that program have stuck with me and have changed the way I teach. I noticed a positive impact in my students growth, so of course I am passionate about it and keep on finding new ways to implement it in my teaching. This is reflected in my TPT store as quite a few of my products relate to comprehension.

Over the next few posts I will be sharing my knowledge and experiences as well as some teaching ideas :)

The Super Six Comprehension Strategies
Obviously this is the starting point as the rest of the ideas all relate back to the strategies. A while ago, I wrote a post about how I introduced them to my year 1 class. You can read all about that over here.

I recently revamped the strategies into 'Super Powers'. Kids love Super Heroes, so I thought that it would be cool to have a 'We can be reading superheroes by using our Super Six Comprehension Powers' theme. I think it works pretty well as by using these "super powers" they are able to have a deeper understanding of what they are reading :)

If I were on class, I'd have a wall with each poster hanging up and student work on display underneath each poster to form a wall that teaches. The work would rotate regularly to keep it fresh and be relevant to the topic that we are covering. Sounds like a lot of work, but it's really not that hard. The pride the students have when their work is up makes it worth it :)

My role is different this year, so what I do with these strategies is sort of the same but different. I'll use all the strategies with each text that we read, but I'll have a focus lesson on one of the strategies. In the lesson we define what the strategy is, what we do with it and how it helps us. Why do I do a focus lesson? because I think it's always beneficial to brush up on these skills! As a classroom teacher, I loved when a relief teacher would do a lesson that recapped key skills because there are always some kids that could do with that extra practice.

Examples of focus lessons for each strategy;
Visualising - read a section of text and have students draw what they think the character/scene/object looks like. Students label their picture and then write sentences to describe. By getting students to label you can what clues they used to form their visualisation (i.e it the text mentioned that the monster has red, bloodshot eyes and the student uses that exact label you can see that they have been paying close attention).

Making Connections - read the text and students use a sentence starter to write and draw their connections.

Predicting/Inferring - Have students orally tell or write down their predictions throughout the reading of the text. Get them to back up their predictions with evidence from the text.

Questioning - Have students come up with "I wonder..." statements and then have other students answer the questions. Great way to encourage accountable talk!

Summarising - Somebody, Wanted, But, So, Then. I love this strategy for summarising. It's a great way to introduce it and a starting block for moving onto more detailed summaries. Have the younger grades draw a picture for each, the older grades can use it as a writing prompt. e.g ______ wanted to ____ but _______, so ________ and then ________.

Monitoring - Fix up strategies. This is probably the hardest one to do as a relief teacher, but if you're on class start off by introducing each strategy then slowly start integrating them into your reading groups. The more practice, the better :)

If you're on class, you'll notice your students using these automatically, once they have got the hang of them.

To help develop these strategies, I made two resources. I am finding this first resource very useful in my new role. As a relief teacher, I'm never quite sure if the class teacher would mind if I let students use their books, so naturally using paper is the easier and confrontation free option. Of course, if you're on class this is also very useful in developing the strategies with your students.

This pack is full of graphic organisers for each strategy. There are variations of each activity to cater for different grades and abilities. Each page has a cute border and heading that can be decorated at the end (because students always want to colour in and make it pretty).

Not only do these serve as an activity, they can be used a part of a comprehension journal, a portfolio, an assessment or even as part of your wall that teaches.

Another thing that can be done with the strategies is a Comprehension Journal. I created a collection of journal prompts that can easily be printed and stuck in student books. This will benefit students who struggle to copy off the board as well as combat those "Miss, I only copied the question" moments. Each prompt has a reminder of the strategy at the top for quick reference.

This is also a big help for teachers who face photocopying restrictions. Only a few copies need to be printed as opposed to a full class set :)

Visuals are a very important in student learning. I love walking into rooms full of anchor charts and walls that teach. However sometimes it's not practical to have students roaming around the room so this is where bookmarks and a quick reference page come in handy!

Simply print and laminate to have a colourful bookmark that students can easily refer to at their desks. The quick reference page can be stuck in their workbooks.

An important part of using these strategies is incorporating them into classroom discussion! By modelling these to your students, you will be encouraging them to use the strategies in their own conversations. Here is a fun way to get it started; Question Sticks!

These require little preparation! Just print, laminate and attach to a paddle pop stick. Alternatively you can just print, laminate and put in a jar. Make asking and answering questions a little bit more exciting by having students pick a question from a jar and have a class discussion. Think about it, what's more fun? sitting there being asked questions by the same person? or hearing from a variety of people? You'll also find that once students become familiar with these questions, they will start asking them without the prompts. Remember, modelling is the key!

Comprehension can be a lot of fun, integrate it as much as possible. The only time it should be a stand alone lesson is when you are introducing the strategies! Once your students have got it, they should become a natural part of your lessons.

The next couple of posts on this topic will be talking about specific strategies. Stay tuned!

Casual Teaching on Year 1: Rhyming Words, Summarising and 2D Shapes

Today I was on the same Year 1 class as last week. Once again I had a pretty great day with them :)

Here are some of the things we go up to...

Rhyming Words
We reviewed the concept. Students were able to tell me that they are words that sound the same AND have the same sound/letters at the end of the word.

We did a choral read of Hop on Pop by Dr. Seuss. This book just lead perfectly into it as it states the rhyming words before putting them into sentences.

After that I gave students a word and they had to brainstorm as many words as possible that rhymed with the word.

To end the lesson we played a whole class game; rhyming word dominoes. The dominoes joined by finding the pictures that rhymed.

Summarising
I introduced the concept of summarising by explaining that we take the most important ideas and say them in our own words. I related this to giving news, how we don't give EVERY single detail.

The text I was was Giraffes Can't Dance.

After reading the text I introduced the 'Somebody, Wanted, But, So, Then' strategy using my retelling pack, which you can find over here.

As a class we went through each step;

Somebody? Who was the main character? Gerald.
Wanted? What did he want? To dance.
But? What was the problem? He couldn't.
So? What did he do to fix the problem? He practised.
Then? What happened at the end? He was able to dance at the Jungle Dance.

Then students filled out this graphic organiser, which is from my Super 6 Activity Pack on TPT. You can check it out by clicking here.

Students could either draw or write in the boxes.

2D Shapes
To start this lesson off, students brainstormed a list of all the 2D shapes they could think of. I was pretty impressed that they already knew of nonagons and decagons. We then played a game where students had to find things in the classroom that were a given shape.

After that, students made a shape pizza. In the morning I had cut out a whole heap of shapes from coloured paper. Students had to grab a handful of shapes from the bag, arrange them on their pizza and then count how many of each shape to complete statements about their pizza.

Tomorrow is the last day of term 2 and then we have a 2 week holiday. My goal for the holiday is to go through all my teaching resources and sort them out a bit better. At the moment I have bits and pieces all over the place.

Enjoy the rest of your week! :)

Casual Teaching on Year 1: Visualising, Mass, Rhyming and Craft!

Today was my first day teaching in 13 months!

I was excited to come back. As much as I loved travelling, I still missed being in the classroom.

I was given a Year 1 class, which I was happy about. I prefer teaching K-3 and feel more comfortable with that grade range as that's where I've had the most experience.

Seeing everyone again was nice. Lots of hugs and 'Welcome Back' moments :)

So what did we do today?

After the morning routine was taken care of, we did a lesson on one of the Super Six Comprehension Strategies; Visualising.

I started if off with a revision of the concept and read a passage from The Gruffalo's Child.

The passage described the Big Bad Mouse character. Students then drew and coloured their visualisations. Students were encouraged to label their drawing e.g. "long, strong tail" and "fiery eyes".

Students then shared their drawings with the class and I showed them what the mouse looked like in the story. If you're not familiar with the text, the Big Bad Mouse looks like a normal mouse. This was a great discussion point - Why was the mouse described as being big and scary when he was just a regular mouse?

At that point we had to pack up and go to the library, so I left them with that question and we would go back to it later.

Library was fun, I got to read a story to the two classes.

I had duty first half of lunch. They added a new duty area and I had no idea where it was. Awkward! I had a whole heap of students follow me around asking me where I had been and if it was really me, haha. I never thought that so many students would have noticed I wasn't around.

After lunch, I read The Gruffalo's Child. The students picked up that the Gruffalo couldn't remember exactly what the mouse looked like so he made it up.

We then moved onto maths. I brought in my own equal arm balance. A great purchase for only $5 a few years ago. We talked about what it is used for and how to read it. Then we had some fun by estimating how many 10's rods would be needed to equalise the balance with various classroom objects. Very important to make sure the students were counting each rod as they placed it in rather than just counting randomly.

There was only about half an hour till recess so we had a mini lesson on rhyming words. After discussing what rhyming words are, I read There's a Wocket in my Pocket by Dr. Seuss.

Dr. Seuss books are great for rhyming words. The students loved the story as well as picking out the rhyming words on each page.

After the story, we played a game. I picked a base word and then called out words that rhymed with the word. As long as the words rhymed with my base word, the students could move around the room. When I called out a word that did not rhyme, students had to freeze. Great way to get the wiggles out!

After recess, we did a craft activity. Students could make either a lion or a butterfly.

It was a great first day back and the day just flew by. Looking forward to more days :) I would love to post photos of the work, but to keep it simple and avoid any sort of legal drama, I'm refraining from posting. It's just not worth the potential trouble.

Making Connections: Thinking Stem Posters

One of my other comprehension resources are the Making Connections Thinking Stem Posters. Click on the picture to see it in my TPT store :)

This was another resource I used in my room when teaching the Super Six. We started out with Text to Self Connections. As we read several texts students were able to choose a thinking stem to help articulate their thoughts. Students shared their connections in pairs, small groups and with the class.

After sharing their connections verbally, students moved onto writing a sentence and drawing a picture. The posters were placed on their desk to help them with their writing.

The posters were also hung on the wall so that students could always go back and refer to it if they needed to. This saved a lot of "Miss how do you spell ________" moments. They can also be scaled down and clipped together with a ring clip for use in guided reading groups or individual use.

Super Six Comprehension Strategies

I I love making resources. One of the latest resources I've made is a set of 6 posters about The Super Six Comprehension Strategies. Click on the picture to check it out on TPT.

The Super Six were used everyday in my classroom. I hung up the posters on my back wall and under each poster student work was hung up. Each time we started a new topic, new work was put on display. It became a Wall That Taught and was a great way of showcasing student work.

Here's a summary of how it was used in my year 1 classroom. This was not done in one lesson, but multiple lessons over a few weeks.

First of all we had a discussion about the meaning of the word text (check out my freebie poster in the previous post). We talked about how reading was not just about books and how we can read posters, music, diagrams e.t.c. This was an important concept as the students would be using the comprehension strategies with a range of texts.

Once the students had grasped that idea, it was time to introduce The Super Six! The first strategy was Visualising. We did a lot of activities that involved listening to passages and music. Students were asked to draw what they thought characters, objects and scenes looked like. It was important to emphasise that it's okay if their visualisation looked different to their friends'. Once they drew their pictures they were able to share their pictures and explain how they came to their visualisation. Ideas for texts; The Gruffalo, The Twits and any rainforest music.

The next strategy was Predicting. Students were already familiar with this, but I wanted to take it a bit further by getting them to explain how they reached their prediction. I also introduced them to the thinking stem "I predict...". We also started using this strategy for informational texts. They started to use features of the text like subheadings, text boxes and diagrams to assist in their predictions.

After that we covered Making Connections. We started off with Text to Self Connections with the thinking stem "This reminds me of...". Students wrote sentences in their journals using this stem and drew pictures. We then moved on to Text to Text Connections with the thinking stem "This remind me of......because....". This was a great opportunity to use traditional fairytales and the remakes of them (I.e The Three Little Pigs and The True Story of the Three Little Pigs). Then we focused on Text to World Connections. I picked out texts that I knew had something related to what we had done in school. A good text for this was George Saves the World by Lunchtime as we had previously been learning about recycling and had implemented a few green practices in our classroom.

Next up was Questioning. For this strategy we focused on the thinking stem "I wonder...". This helped the students come up with questions that required deeper thinking. We asked questions before, during and after reading.

Summarising was introduced by linking it to when we give news. We talked about how we only give the main points and don't talk about the little, unimportant things. To get students started we used the "Somebody wanted, but, so" strategy. We started off verbally, then drawing and then writing. Once students were confident with this we then moved on to a more detailed version using time connectives. We also had alpha boxes which we used to list the key words from the topic we were focusing on. This also doubled as a word wall.

The last strategy was Monitoring. We talked about what we could do if we didn't understand what we were reading. The students came up with answers like "ask the teacher" or "look at the pictures". We talked about how sometimes the teacher won't always be available to help and that there were things the students could do themselves to help. These were introduced as "Fix Up" strategies complete with a Bob the Builder picture and his catch phrase "Can we fix it? Yes we can!". Strategies we talked about; using pictures, rereading, asking questions, predicting based on what has happened so far, summarising and asking a friend.

Once these introduction lessons were done, we incorporated the strategies in our everyday routines and students started using them on their own without prompting. The use of thinking stems also encouraged deeper conversations and more sophisticated language.

The Super Six definitely made a positive impact on my classroom and the way students were learning. I would encourage anyone to give it a go.