Reading Response

This week and the next few we will been working on a system for writing about our reading.  We are using a T chart to show two things; 1. What the text says and 2. What the text makes us think about as we read.  This method leads us to the fifth grade emphasis on quoting the text accurately.  We work on that standard in both reading and writing this year. 

In reading this week we began working on character analysis.  We are using the Shared Reading method with the book Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes. Shared reading is where every child has the same opportunity to read a grade level text, no matter their reading level. This is because the teacher reads the text, but each child has a copy in front of him/her to follow along.  We are continuing our use of T charts in our response notebooks to analyze how characters in the book act, evolve and feel. We are using an interactive notebook feature to help us organize our new learning about a variety of strategies. We use the notebook organizer to give us ideas about ways we can think about text, and to help guide our journal writing by providing us with a few sentence starters aligned to each strategy. 

Here are some notebook examples from this week: