Reading notebooks so far

Week 4, Day 2

We have most of the kinks worked out with our notebooks.

Our reading one has our table of contents:

We've recorded a lot of our thoughts in our notebooks.

Here is a poem we analyzed and worked on recording our thinking:

We've been reading aloud Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief, which my students are absolutely loving!

We practiced making predictions based on the front and back covers as well as the table of contents.  We discussed the importance of noticing illustrations and making predictions about the story.  They did a really great job with this lesson.

Here we have been keeping track of characters in our novels:

We will compare and contrast them, but it's important for students to keep track of characters as they grow over the novel.

We also have used this FCRR think sheet

to analyze Percy :)

Here we have our reference sheet for context clues (from the previously mentioned amazing CORE source book)

We used the context clues lesson when we re-read parts of the Lightning Thief to focus on unknown words.  They are working on determining meaning based on context clues:

Here we tried a new strategy called brain mapping:

We cut apart a thinking map and added our own thoughts.  It took WAY longer than anticipated and I'm not sure we'll be doing it again any time soon, but it was nice to show students a new way to record their notes.

We are working on figurative language in our intervention block as well as in whole group reading.  We are applying these terms to analyzing poems.

Here is the poem we are working on:

We read it today to look for figurative language.  Tomorrow we will re-read the passage with the intention of looking for theme.

Our poem is slightly too long for our notebooks, 

so we problem solved by folding it in half and only gluing in part :)

Here is our thinking sheet about comparing and contrasting settings that was made by my awesome colleague:

We will be using it when we analyze different settings in The Lightning Thief.

Here is our phrasing lesson and a half sheet reference for Greek gods (to help with the Lightning Thief)

We've done a lot in the first few weeks of school!