Pinteresting Reading Ideas!

Good morning!  I have really enjoyed Just Reed's Ten Pin Linky because I've been able to Pin so many other great ideas!  This week's focus is on reading, and who can't use more resources for reading!?!?  Let's get started on my 10!

1. I really like this anchor chart for writing about reading.  It outlines expectations and ideas in an easy and simple way.  I'm thinking that modeling what this might actually look like and then posting those models around the chart would be helpful too.

2.  We use The Continuum by Fountas & Pinnell a lot in our reading instruction and to guide our mini lessons and questioning.  This chart outlines what within, beyond, and about the text questions might look like when reading any book.  I love how transferable these are to most books!

3. And...we all know that even in K and 1, we're encouraging our students to find the answers in the text.  As they get into 2nd grade and beyond our expectations head into writing about the evidence.  I love this quick and easy reference for sentence starters to help.  I'm thinking this will be especially helpful in my ENL world!

4.  This is a quick and easy game reviewing Nonfiction Conventions.  There is a primary version and an intermediate version based on your grade level.   This is a great game for review and making learning fun!

5. I just love this bulletin board where it shows active readers.  I'm imagining so many different things that can be posted in front of these sweet faces...book recommendations, book summaries, character analysis, etc.!

6.  This pin shows a huge reading bulletin board that appears to be school-wide.  As I came across this pic, I thought it would be really fun to send students home with a sheet to fill out over the summer about a book they read.  They can then bring these back at the ice cream social or first week of school.  We would post a large board with all of our summer reading and learning!  What a great way to celebrate students' continued work.

7. I love the idea of a picture frame for several reasons.  It's easy to store flat, the contents can be changed easily, and it looks clean and organized.  I especially liked this one because part of it can be changed daily for the "must do" activity, and the other activities are a bit more permanent.  Easy to use!

8. Well,  I'm putting this link up here, because it's a professional reading idea I think all should pursue.  I posted here about Teach Like a Pirate last week, but what I thought was so cool was that the author, Dave Burgess, commented on my blog!!  Now that is why he is so dynamic!  He connects with everyone, whether in his classroom or via the web!  How cool!

9.  I liked this interactive vocabulary activity.  It reminds me a lot of the game Headbands, but there is a sheet that goes with the activity to assist students figure out their word.  Not only does it help the student with the word, but it makes the other students think about the true meaning in order to answer the questions.  

10. I love how organized this library is (I think it's before school has started), but also the volume of books and the cute lanterns hanging down.  I think a big, organized library is crucial in a classroom.  I like how inviting the area is for students and how easy it will be for her students to find books!

I hope you've enjoyed my 10 this week for reading!  I gotta run to the grocery and get ready for the 4th!    Have an awesome holiday tomorrow!!

Integrating Technology into Reading and Bloglovin' Giveaway!

Good morning!  I'm joining Amanda and Aylin from Learning to the Core for their Tune into Technology Linky!  This week's theme is for how to integrate technology into reading.  I think this linky is great timing since the summer is the best time to explore new sites, apps, etc. and actually have time to play around with them!

After perusing my Twitter feed, I came across an awesome new website called ThingLink.  What I love about ThingLink is that it is super easy to use!  The whole purpose of ThingLink is to make your images interactive.

While reading The Other Side last year, we talked a lot about symbolism and what the fence meant in the story.  I wrote about this book on Sunday if you want more information.  With ThingLink, I found a picture of a white fence and uploaded it to my creation.  From there, it will let you tag anywhere on the image to add more information.  I tagged a place to describe the fence, talk about my favorite moment in the book, and add a link to the author's website.

Here is my ThingLink! It's pretty simple with only a few tags, but remember, this is my time to play!  I can refine later!  The colored dots reflect different tags that I have added about the book.  You may click on it to go to the actual page so that the tags work.

I also wanted to share another one that I found that is all about the song Wagon Wheel, a summer favorite of mine!  This lady has created a great ThingLink with lots of links, information, and even the song. I can't take any credit for it, but notice all of the tags!  Click on it for some good time fun with this song.

So...how can you use this for reading? Let me count the ways!

1.  Symbolism - I find this is the easiest connection since the whole premise is to make an image interactive.

2. Character Traits - We've all seen those organizers that point to different parts of a character's body and students write about what they are thinking, doing with their hands, feel with their heart, etc.  With this site, you can have them copy an image of the character or someone they think looks like the character and tag different parts.  

3. Book Retell or Report - What a great way to tell about a story while embedding links or just typing different parts of the book.  

4. Book Talks - An option with ThingLink is to embed video.  What better way to have students share what they know by video taping themselves and including it in their ThingLink. 

Here are just a few of the different ways I've thought of, but I can't wait to get started with my kiddos this year!  I hope you've enjoyed this!

Bloglovin' Giveaway!
I don't know about you all, but I'm loving my daily Bloglovin' emails!  It's helped so much so that I don't miss great posts!  I'm joining the rest of the Bloglovin' crew for a giveaway of one of my TPT products!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Link up and find all the great people who are doing giveaways!  What a fun way to meet new bloggers, and maybe win a giveaway!  

Alrighty, I gotta run, but don't forget to link up!

Reading Incentive Chart and November Currently

As the ESL teacher in my building, I have always felt that my time is limited with these kids and I'm never able to do everything I want to do with them in just 30 minutes a day.  One large thing I have noticed is that many of my students are not reading at home.  The reason?  Many of their parents can't help them decode words or talk about their understanding.  I have wanted a way to encourage my students (grades 1-4) to read more.  More than the minimum requirement of their classroom.

As I've stepped into this role, there have been many things that I've wanted to go back and change in my previous classrooms, such as minimum reading requirements.  Why would I limit my readers to just 15 or 20 minutes a night if they would have read 30?  Why wouldn't I encourage my reluctant readers through high-interest text selection and work on finding good books for them rather than counting minutes?  So...I've taken one day during the week to talk about books we've read, do a book talk, and go to the library to find good fit books with high-interest levels.  Yes, this is an entire 30 minutes where the mini-lesson is directed toward determining the central message or theme, finding rhythm and rhyme in words, or responding to our reading through writing.

 To encourage reading, I of course, headed to Pinterest and blogs to see what other people had created for reading incentives.  I came across The Teacher Wife's reading incentive chart and liked the concept, but wasn't sure my 3rd and 4th grade boys would want necklaces.  From this, I started thinking what I could do that would visually encourage reading.  I made a tag for each of my ESL kiddos, bought some ribbon, and went to town.  The title of our board?  Real.Hard.Reading.Work.

First of all, they just love to see their name, and they all get their own ribbon.  I lined all of them up on the wall, and each time they get to another 100, they get a new card to put on their ribbon, but they also get a ticket in our school-wide positive behavior system.  Those tickets are like gold, so the kids are really excited!

Can you tell that I ran out of the wide ribbon?  Apparently when you get excited about the wide and thin grosgrain ribbon being the same price, you don't actually get the same length of it. Haha.  Since this picture, I have returned to Hobby Lobby (only of course when their ribbon is 50% off) to get more of the pink and orange.  The title above it looks much better in person, but the laminate doesn't help!

Lastly is my November Currently!  I can't believe it's already November, but then again, I think I say this every month. I hope you all will join Farley's Currently and enjoy the fun.  I love to see what other people are doing!  Click the link above or the image below to link up!

Happy Fall, and enjoy your extra hour of sleep tonight with Daylight Savings Time!

Wish-To-Do List and Currently

I've always found that if I put something in print I am more apt to do it, so I thought I'd use this post on the first official week of summer to declare my list!  It's called my wish-to-do list because some things aren't extremely necessary, but definitely something I'd like to do.

MY WISH-TO-DO LIST

1. Train my new puppy, Addie, and don't forget about my old puppy, Scout!

2. Read the books Focus and Drive.  The second book will hopefully be done with some friends from school in our Thursday book club.  It's our way of continuing to see each other throughout the summer, grab some grub, and continue to learn!

3. Redo some of my TpT units that I lost when my file disappeared.  First on my list is my Student Led Conference Binder with many new additions including m-Class data to go along with the Aimsweb data, trimester and quarterly updates for different school calendars, etc.  If there are any requests, send them my way!

4. Surprise my husband! I am a huge planner and always want to make sure he's okay with everything, so these rarely work out.  I usually end up giving it away, but I'm going to really try this time!  

5. Enjoy some time at the pool and remind myself that it's OKAY to relax and enjoy summer!

6.  Visit with friends as often as possible.

7. Plant more flowers, trim bushes, and basically make all of my neighbors wish they had our yard (ha, yea right!).

8. Reenergize for next school year!

9.  Lastly, get back into my running routine, set goals, and run with friends to change things up!  

What is on your Wish-To-Do List for this summer?  

CURRENTLY

And lastly, it's the start of a new month so Farley at Oh' Boy 4th Grade has her new currently up!  Also, check out her AWESOME new blog design and the Block Partay she's having for grade level blogs.  Farley always has it goin' on, and she's rocked this one again!

Click on my Currently Poster to see what our other blogging friends are up to this June and to link up.  Don't forget to check out Farley's blog design too!

Happy Summer to all!

A little more on Inferencing

I posted earlier about my introduction for inferencing with my friendly dog, Scout.  This is what we've been up to since then!

Inferring the meaning of a word:
Thanks to one of my 2nd grade teammates, I used the book The Wretched Stone written by Chris Van Allsburg to discuss how to infer the meaning of a word.  We discussed what we thought the word "wretched" meant, and used orange to write down our predictions about the word before we read.  Luckily, this was a new word to the whole class! Then, as I read we used green to write down our inferences as we read more clues during the book.  About half way through, we stopped making inferences until we had all of our clues at the end.  The pink words were our inferences about the meaning of the word after we had used all of the clues.  We outlined the word "terrible" as the word we felt was our best inference, before confirming in the dictionary.  It was a great visual for the kids to see how our inferences get better with more clues from the author.

Animal Riddles: I used a website that showed animal riddles to get the kids using their schema in a fun way.  They loved guessing the animals, and then I would ask questions about what they already knew to help them make their inferences.  The next day, I wrote my own animal riddle and they had to write down their "schema" for what helped them.  I had them cover up the poem with a folder so they couldn't look at all the clues at once.  It was fun to see how their inferences changed with more clues.

The kids got to write their own "What am I?" poems the next day to put up on our bulletin board.  As you can tell, I have a ranch theme in my room, hence the cowboy hats.  On the board, I stapled a baggie that had post-it notes and sharpened pencils so that the board could be interactive.  When kids switch for math, RtI, or Guided Reading, they can make a quick inference. If their work is done early, they are able to go to the hallway to make some inferences about their friends' poems as well.  Who knew inferencing could be so fun?!

Click here for the sheet they used!

 Here is the title page I used (and updated at home with a graphic) to put on my bulletin board. 

 Title Page

I'm sad that our inferencing unit is almost over, because it is one of my favorites, but glad that these skills will keep coming up in the future!  

Break = Work on School Things I've Been Wanting to do Forever!

I love winter break because it gives me so much time to be with my family, clean up my house, get the stomach flu (an unexpected visitor), and regain my inspiration and motivation to do some of those things that have been on my list at school for so long!  I retyped and made some of my literature circle activities more appropriate for my 2nd graders.  One of my good teaching buddies is a 4th grade teacher, and she had let me use a form of the lit. circles for quite some time, but when I moved to 2nd grade they needed to be a bit more primary, and bit more updated!  After finishing up my report cards today, I decided to venture into this project, and it's finally done!  I've added it to my TpT store.  I'm trying to figure out how to make my unit look as cool as everyone else's on their blogs, but for now, you'll just have to check it out  at Teachers Pay Teachers.

If I don't post again until after Saturday, I hope you all have a great New Year!!!  See you in 2012!