And it's been rough. I haven't felt nearly put together enough to even write a blog post about it.
But here we are in October (my favorite month and also HOW?) and I'm finally feeling ready enough to let you in on some routines I use in my 3rd grade classroom.
First, let me share our schedule and then I will walk you through the different pieces. Since the whole day would be the longest blog post of all time, I'm going to break it down into sections.
Problem of the Day is something I display on the SmartBoard and students work on in their math journals as soon as they come in. Our curriculum has problems of the day an often I use those but sometimes I will pull problems I know my students need help with or are going to encourage them to think more critically.
After I take care of morning housekeeping tasks, I try to walk around and just take a quick "temperature" of each kid and how they're doing on their task. Depending on how my class is doing, we go over the problem at the beginning of morning meeting or I pull it into whole group math.
I will address problems of the day in a whole post soon. (as well as Morning Meeting)
For today's post I want to focus on the Reading portion of our day.
Here is the way I try to break up our mini-lessons for whole group reading
Monday: Mentor text and graphic organizer to practice our comprehension strategy, word sort to practice spelling skill
Tuesday: I use a story from our curriculum to practice the comprehension skill (usually main idea or theme) and have students practice independently/with a partner
Wednesday: Short grammar lesson, genre - we also play a game with our vocabulary words this day
Thursday: I use Readworks passages or our curriculum story to practice "test prep" (I love using QAR) and doing some close read activities together
Friday: Review games and extra practice
I keep my whole group times short and sweet. I also don't delve into the "deep" things because I see my kids in small group to hit those.
After we do a short whole group lesson or activity, we go into Daily 5. My school requires us to do Daily 5 and we have 4-5 teachers that push-in during this time. I have 2 teachers in my room. So, with both of them meeting a group as well as myself, there are actually very few kids doing Daily 5. My lower kids only do this 1-2 times a week because they see both teachers and me. For this reason, it was hard for me to make a forced rotation schedule that worked for us.
I decided to instead let students have complete choice (gasp!) over what center they want to do at each time. I really went heavy on procedure practice and guess what? It works.
This is what I display on our SmartBoard during Daily 5. I call students by groups to get to pick. I don't really care how many students are at each center (except listening - which is why I only have 5 earbuds and once they're gone you choose something else). My students know that if they see a teacher they get their stuff ready and get to that spot and if they don't, they make a choice, get their stuff, and find a spot.
Daily 5 is one of our favorite parts of the day.
During this time, I see my bubble kids everyday, my low kids twice a week (they're being seen twice every day), and my high kids twice a week (I desperately wish for more time). I do an intervention program my school has (although I tweak it) for my bubble kids and fluency games with my lower kids (they read with both other teachers so so much). My high kids do novel studies.
Word work always has 3 choices and it's a mix of our spelling and vocabulary lists. I bought 3 blue tubs from Michaels and I just fill them with whatever choices I want to give them that week. They usually don't know what's in there until they choose one and open it. We do things like vocabulary hunt (use their vocabulary journal to find words that fill certain criteria), word worth (each letter is worth something), create a word search, sorts, and crosswords.
One thing that is always in the tub is Vocabulary Sentence Scramble. I got this idea from The Brown Bag Teacher and I couldn't recommend it more. My kids dive for this center every week and love it. All I do is use colored sentence strips to make sentences that use our vocabulary words, but the vocabulary word is a blank. Then, I cut the words apart. Each sentence goes in a baggie. Students work to unscramble the sentence and then fill in the missing vocabulary word. My students think it's a fun challenge and desperately try to be the first person to figure out and write all 8 sentences (sometimes it takes them all week!). At first I was nice and put capitals and periods and even put the number of letters the missing word had. Over time, I phase out the help and make the students "fix" the sentence in the end by adding correct capitalization and punctuation.
Again, Daily 5 in my room is student choice. I don't tell them where to go and I don't even really tell them what to get done. On Fridays, I will check and star things they did. I also pull out a few amazing pieces to put up in the room but I never really grade it. If they never do a Scribble Story, I'm not going to sweat it (although those are their favorite and I get about 40 a week). When I look up, I see students reading, writing, and working.
It works for us.
After Daily 5, we reconvene for another mini-lesson. This is when I pull in writing. On Mondays, I do explicit writing instruction. Each week we focus on a type of writing. Last week we did Personal Narratives and this week we are doing How-To writing. Each Monday my students receive a rubric and a pre-writing graphic organizer. During Monday mini-lesson we go over the rubric, grade some examples, and go over the pre-writing paper. I write one and they grade mine (they love this!) Now they are ready to get started writing for the week! The rest of the week, I touch on grammar (connect it to writing), word work (connect it to writing), vocabulary (connect it to writing - see a theme?), and anything else language related.
After this mini-lesson, my students break into forced rotation stations. They are split into 4 groups (blue, red, yellow, green).
I love using my Smartboard to display what we are doing because if someone walks in, they immediately know what to do.
Stations change every other day.
Ipad station usually stays the same - SpellingCity. I will probably only change this when my kids get bored of it - which hasn't happened yet.
Reading station:
Monday/Tuesday: They listen to the Wonders curriculum story of the week (and read along). This way we don't take precious class time to listen to it but they have still heard it so we can talk about it.
Wednesday/Thursday: My students log on to Readworks.org and do their assignments. They love that it gives the immediate feedback and I love that I can assign them all different texts (so they're on their level) and the questions are deeper than simple recall (seriously recommend!) Some of the questions are even short response so my students have to think deeply.
Writing station: (a writing rotation lasts 2 weeks)
Monday/Tuesday: students complete their graphic organizer and illustrations for their writing
Wednesday/Thursday: students complete their first draft
Monday/Tuesday: Students use colored pencils to edit and revise their writing (make it better) and write a 2nd draft
Wednesday/Thursday: Students finalize their draft and publish it on SeeSaw.
My table:
Monday/Tuesday: I teach the vocabulary words at my table, students fill them into a TIP chart and put them in their TIP chart folder (school required activity but I like it)
Wednesday/Thursday: Since students have listened to the curriculum story of the week, they come ready to talk and answer questions about it. I write questions (higher level, open ended) on index cards and we just dive in. With only 5-6 kids I know each student is engaged, not just passing by. I can also differentiate the questions and supports for each group.
Specials breaks up our stations nicely and I have the board up ready for them to come right back in and get started in their 2nd station.
I love our reading block because I really feel I get to dive deep with each kid. By seeing them in smaller groups throughout the day, I am able to know that they're paying attention and I can take notes on who needs more help.
That's it for reading! Please be sure to check back for the post on math and problem of the day/morning meeting!
Happy OCTOBER!
