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Showing posts from October, 2017

Poems for Fluency

Research has shown that reading poetry improves student reading fluency.  Last year I began having my students read poems for 5 minutes a day and saw their fluency scores improve dramatically! Every Monday, students get a new poem for the week, selected for their reading level, and they practice it every day. When time allows, they perform it in front of the class. This upcoming week, we will keep the poems for a bit longer and perform them with a green screen camera on Wednesday. Many students are memorizing their poems! Ask your student if they can recite one of the poems we've worked on so far this year.

Mentor Texts for ELD

All our third grade classes have been working with mentor texts (or sentences) to help our students become better writers and communicators.  Students study a sentence carefully selected from our Anchor Texts.  They idenitfy the nouns, verbs, adjectives, and so on.  Then they "play" with the mentor text by manipulating it to make new sentences. Students then write their own imitation of the mentor text by using a frame. Students are giving a pre and post assessment to demonstrate what they have learned about their writing.