Materials for groups

Many of us attended guided reading sessions today.
If not, we are all going through Fountas and Pinnell Benchmark assessments - with the purpose of informing our instruction for small groups during reading.

So with some of my time this afternoon, I attempted to rally some leveled reading materials and resources.

Small groups can be guided and level based. They can be focused on a strategy that different levels of students need improvement. These groups might listen to an above level text read aloud, or independent level texts may be used to ensure easy decoding so the focus is on comprehension.


We have many leveled options available to us; however, it never seems like enough!

Here are some leveling options to play around with when planning for guided reading or strategy groups. Its difficult to find a correlation or conversion chart where Fountas and Pinnell levels match up exactly with Lexile or other leveling systems. Teacher judgement and testing texts out will most likely be needed when using some of the following resources.

Also, look at students' Lexile scores on myON and MAP! How exciting to have so much data to take into consideration when planning for the best interests of our students!

Ways to find levels
Lexile correlation to FnP levels - with Lexile in small increments.
Reading A-Z levels correlation to FnP and Lexile - Lexiles in increments ranging from 50 to 370

https://readability-score.com - I would focus on Flesch-Kincaid options and correlate to Lexile.

Book Wizard - Scholastic book search by guided reading (FnP) level or Lexile

Lexile book search

Leveled Text options

Fiction and Non-fiction leveled passage - by Lexile

Newsela.com - nonfiction texts by grade level and Lexile

Pearson leveled books - same log-in as Pearson Math - guided reading levels tend to be harder than RAZ or FnP levels

Don't forget about Komensky's BOOK ROOM in the back of the science/art room!!!
And of course myON's books are leveled my Lexile and guided reading levels!

Building a sense of community and acceptance

In any classroom I feel it is important to build a community of learners that care for each other. Students need to truly care for each others feelings, respect their differences, and want to help each other learn to have a high functioning classroom. This is a difficult task to fully accomplish, in my opinion.


This school year I am going to check out some of these books to educate about diversity. This variety of books looks at cultural diversity, and tolerance through many different lenses. 

This list has books that focus more on being yourself and accepting other people's differences.

The Washington Post shares 3 books that many help teach about diversity too.


Hopefully I can create a fun and meaningful after reading activity that links what we read to learning and personality differences as well. I will share later if I'm able to do this.

With any luck, this first step will help me create a peaceful and empowering classroom environment.


Good luck and have a happy school year!

A Reminder about Picture Books

I'm subscribed to a blog called Nerdy Book Club. I get weekly emails including about 5 posts from it. 

This week I got an update email that included this post: "Top 10 Things Picture Books Taught Me". It's a quick read, and includes some great reminders about using picture books to teach writing and reading strategies, as well as other life lessons. It also mentions some titles that were new to me. Enjoy!

Here is the link...

http://nerdybookclub.wordpress.com/2014/01/20/top-10-things-picture-books-taught-me-by-beth-shaum/ 

Running Records

WHEN?
Running records (RR) should be done on a regular basis with your students (on level = 1x per month; below = bi-weekly).

WHY?
The purpose is to record the process and behaviors the student exhibits while reading to inform our instruction on both fluency (accuracy, rate, expression) AND comprehension. We want to see what the students are doing and understanding independently with the texts they are choosing.

If you have a very fluent reader, who is accurate and expressive, you will want to focus on the comprehension discussion after the sample of the student's reading.

WHAT TO USE?
You can pre-count words in a common text for a student to read during small group instruction. If you are conferring with a student, make sure you know the level of the student's own book, and listen to them read. Depending on the type of book the student is reading, usually a page and a half to a page is usually 100 words.


HOW?

Docs for Planning Workshops

Here are some documents to help make your planning for readers' workshop clear and concise.


RW Mini-Lesson Planner
- questions to help you consider everything you might need to prepare for a lesson
- prompts to help keep your teacher talk focused

Month by Month layout of Readers and Writing Workshops

Summer workshop Sites

• you have to be logged into your district google account
• has slideshows and downloads from the summer workshops

Reading Workshop and Writing Workshop google site
- structures of workshops
- what to do within the structures
- additional resources and organizers

Guided Reading
- videos modeling for each grade level
- slideshow of structure and instruction

Close Reading
- how it relates to common core
- what it is
- why we do it
- questioning strategies
- tips
- resources

Book Leveling Resources

Reading just right books is important for students to feel like successful readers.
They should be able to read most words (less than 5 errors on a sample of the text), and be able to understand or retell the important parts. It is a good idea to post book levels on the inside of books. When posted on the outside of a book, students may not be thinking about their interests or purpose for reading when choosing a book.  Classroom libraries are best organized when they are sorted using a combination of genre, series, and/or author. We want our students to think of themselves as "readers", not just a letter.

Below are some resources to help you find book levels...

Fountas and Pinnell (FnP) use various factors to determine a book's level.

____________________________________
FnP doesn't have the book you're looking for? Find the lexile, then use a conversion chart to find the approximate FnP level.

Lexile determines a book level only on semantic (vocabulary) and syntactic (sentence structure) elements of a text. Its better than nothing, but not as accurate as FnP.
Conversion chart

UPDATE 9/15/13

Another chart that shows the correlations between FnP, RAZ-kids, and Common Core Lexile standards - color coded by grade