Kingston's Reading Classes

We will be finishing our persuasive essays today and then we will have the exam on Wednesday.  There will be a vocabulary test tomorrow for words we didn’t test on last week.  Then, we will start a nonfiction reading assignment.  There will be a lot of loose ends to wrap up this week, please let me know if you have any questions.

Both 2nd period reading and 9th period have started new books.  The books are more challenging than the first one they read, so I expect they will have to work a little harder to do the assignments.  Please encourage the students to use their reading strategies to answer questions that they have before they get outside help.  That is my purpose in choosing the stories.  I want them to be challenged.   That being said, if they are  having a LOT of difficulty, please let me know.  I don’t want to cause them stress!  The 5/6th period class is close to finishing Walk Two Moons.  We are working on developing inference skills and will soon begin exploring themes in the story.  Most of the classes got a late start on this week’s vocabulary, so I might postpone the vocab. test until Monday.

Students reading Tuck Everlasting will view the video this week and have an exam on the material on Thursday. We will begin our new novel next week. Students reading Walk Two Moons will continue with their reading, focusing on inference and theme identification. We will have new vocabularies in all classes, with an exam on Friday.

      Last week, the students looked at the various reading strategies and analyzed their purpose.  This week, we will apply those same strategies to their reading probes.  I will ask them to evaluate which strategy(ies) might have helped them to answer any missed questions correctly.  We will then look at the outcome and see what strategies the classses identified the most.  I will then encourage the students to take special note of them.  In Tuck Everlasting, we are about finished with the book.  I will be sending home permission slips for students to view a movie of the story.  We will compare/contrast it to the book.  The students should plan on an exam regarding the story sometime next week.  During period 5-6 we are reading Walk Two Moons. We are a little more than halfway through that story.  Things are going well and this group has become quite cohesive very quickly! 

       I am attempting to squeeze an additional vocabulary into this shortened week, with a test on Thursday.   Since we have less time, I will not require the spelling part of the test.

Since we have only been working with this vocabulary for a few days, I felt that we should wait until next week to do the vocab. test.  It will be Friday of next week.  Tomorrow, the students are doing their third role plays for various vocabulary words.  I think the role plays are really helping them understand the words on a deeper level.  I will tell them tomorrow of a new activity we’ll be trying next week in which they choose a topic to research and then each student reads and summarizes a different topic.  This is to give them more  exposure to nonfiction text and practice with reading strategies specific to that type of reading.

Students did well with our discussion on clarification, but I think they are still a little “fuzzy” on when it is used.  We will continue to review this skill.  Next week, we will focus on visualization and how it relates to comprehension.  They will also be looking at their scores on comprehension tests and I will ask them to determine why they missed certain questions.  They will go back through the story and see what they missed the first time.

This week, we are discussing how to clarify a part of the story about which you have a question.  The students are practicing exercising clarification as they read.  I am also modeling this skill to them in class.  Homework is to develop a role play or a visual example to illustrate the meaning of one of our vocabulary words.  The students will share their examples as a way of clarifying the word meanings before our vocabulary test on Friday.

Also–students should continue to read for their reading logs which are due on Friday.  They should have read an additional hour by that time.

Today, we read as a group and discussed the beginnings of the story.  The students were assigned to create both a synonym and antonym for all of their vocabulary terms for homework.  Tomorrow, we will review for the vocabulary quiz on Friday.

Also–the first reading minutes are due Friday–1 hour of independent reading.

We began our first story.  Students were assigned to read the prologue and the first chapter and write a summary of what they read.  I also collected the sentence homework.

We reviewed our new vocabulary words for this week.  The students are responsible for writing sentences with the words for homework.  We will hand out the novels for the students to begin reading tomorrow.

Vocab. test Friday.