Wednesday, October 16, 2013

What in the What?

It has been over a month since I posted.  I am rectifying that situation right now.  I started thinking that no one was missing this little side project of mine and literally in the last week, I have had five friends at school ask me why I haven't blogged and a few new followers on Facebook.  

So I am back!  I have a goal to try to post at least twice a week and I really hope everyone can give me feedback of what they would like to hear about.

In our district we have been very slow to get to Common Core.  We are all at different stages of the game, but at least at my building I can say that we are very dedicated to really learn it and to learn how it can reach our students.  Last Friday we had an in-service and learned a lot about reading for information (yea Abbie).  

I know that we are supposed to be pairing nonfiction and fiction texts each week.  So in honor of our new theme, I tried to do just that.


This is just the start of our new thematic unit (plants and life cycles) so I hope to find authentic literature to pair with our non-fiction text book.

Since this is our real first taste of non-fiction I wanted to teach the elements of non-fictional texts.  So not to overwhelm my kiddos, I am going to stick with a couple of elements everyday for this week and next week.




I am pretty proud of the kids - especially when my favorite part of teaching happens...wait for it.  The connection!  This was the mini-lesson for our reading workshop time today, so after we learned about these elements the students set off to read their own self-selected texts.  The students were so excited to find labels (rótulas) in their non-fiction books!!  I love it!

Do you have any cool ideas to help the kids get into non-fiction or exploring informational texts?  I really want to know!!!


2 comments:

  1. Love your book choices! How do you find/choose the books you use in the classroom? Also, is your entire day taught in Spanish? Love your blog and excited to read more posts!

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    1. Kali - I am glad you like my blog! I teach 70/30 in Spanish/English. We do 45 minutes a day in English and everything is being bridged from Spanish to English or English to Spanish. I really have just found books that work from trial and error over the years. I really love the idea of always having a companion text to go along with the focused text of the week. Sometimes it is a story from the basal and sometimes it is a great trade book I find!

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