Creativity to the Core: Teacher Week

Linking up with Blog Hoppin' Today!

Sadly, I skipped Thursday, because I'm not in the classroom this year, and don't start teaching Character Education as a special until mid-September. Right now, my job is all communications.

However...I am very excited about WHAT Friday!

Today I'm going to share one of my favorite topics to teach in Reading/Language Arts. I absolutely love teaching math, but I know close reading is a hot topic, so I figured I would focus on that for now. :)

Close Reading

I LOVE doing close reading activities with students in order to truly make them understand the text, rather than just glancing through it to find the answers. I have also done a lot of research on the topic for my Master's because it was the topic of my research paper last semester. I was surrounded by close reading!

I did a 5-Day Close Reading Mini-Series this summer to give people some tips and insight into using it in the classroom. You can check that out by clicking on the image above!

I create close reading passages that I know the kids will be engaged in. I also try to make it fit with our unit so that the passages can be classwork and homework. Below is a weekly layout of how I use each set of passages. This is included in each of the sets in my store.

Here is an example of one passage. I use the passage for the entire week. We work on repeated reading to finding unknown words, conquer new vocabulary, find evidence in the text, explore main idea and key details in EACH paragraph, and analyze why the author uses certain text features.

Here's an example of one of my students completing the Vocabulary Builder.

After doing about 3-4 days of digging into the passage, students use what they know to write and explain what they learned. {BTW - Take a look at this hilarious drawing from one of my firsties! Those are suppose to be meerkat tails. HA!!!}

During close reading, I love giving students highlighters and pencils. Sometimes we also use colored pencils. This helps them to identify evidence and then record their answers. I frequently grade and send these home so that parents begin to see their children referring to the passage for evidence. This is a biggie with Common Core (or whatever version of Common Core your school uses lol...I'm in FL and we have new FL standards, however, they are basically the same as Common Core).