A New Step

I attended the Ellin Oliver Keene conference the past two days. Can I just say amazing! I tried several new things with my class today. One of them was what Ellin had us do as readers. I gave my kids a short story and read it to them. Then I had them reread it and write down what they noticed about themselves as a reader as they were reading it. I was sweating bullets for a minute (could they really do this?). Then I had them turn and talk with a partner. To top that off, I had them share what their partner had said (I did horrible at this when I talked with my partner). The class actually was able to share without turning back to say, what did you say?

Their noticings??? The things I overhead were: wanting to know the name of the boy in the wheelchair (he was unnamed), wanting to know more details about the story, how the boy first got in the wheelchair, what they were like at age five themselves, and predicting about what would happen next.

We charted two columns: (please note, I helped sophisticate their language)
What did we do?

• Asked questions
• Inferred
• Connecting to text
• Wanted to know more
• Thinking about before the story

What was the outcome for ourselves?

• Answers
• Filled in a puzzle in our heart, minds, and books
• See better pictures, saw flashbacks, stronger tie to story and will remember it
• Got mind ready to read

I'm excited to continue on this journey of reading workshop. We're going to study for the next couple of week on inferences...should be great!!!