Reading Interests

So, as November continues to pass us by, I am still wondering why it seems like I have nothing in place in my classroom.  This is my first year in 4th grade and the transition was a little harder than I thought.  I am still trying to figure out how to best help my reading students and I think I have come up with a plan.

I have gotten rid my reading logs and decided to conference with my students each morning at the start go reading class.  We sit together and discuss how far we are in our books and I randomly selected students to tell me a little more about their book.  The students really like this and love sharing with me how far they got the night before.  We have been talking about characters in class and I love how they have been better about using the characters' names when they are retelling their readings.

Along with the daily conferencing, I just had the students take an interest survey.  The survey has really helped my students look at their interests more because we are trying to focus on what kinds of books we read.  I want them to focus on finding great books they will enjoy reading.  I found the survey off of applefortheteach.blogspot.com.  There are some great ideas.  

The next step in reading interests is blogging about them!  More to come on the classroom site where my reading students will share what books they have read and their recommendations for others.  Stay tuned!

Vocabulary Pictures

This is an activity I got from the book Word Nerds that I have been reading to help me with teaching vocabulary in my reading class.  The students choose one of their vocabulary words and drew a picture of the meaning of the word but also incorporated the word in the image.

Vocabulary

This is a book that I have started reading to help me boost my vocabulary in my reading class. I wanted to do something other than copy vocabulary words in a notebook and look up the definition.  My reading class struggles a bit in reading and I want to help them understand the words they read.  I have already started some of the activities in this book and they are awesome!  My class is finishing them up tomorrow.

Welcome!

Hello, 

I am so excited to be able to start sharing my ideas with everyone.  I have always been a follower of blogs and love that I can get so many great ideas for teaching from others.  I hope that you enjoy my blog and can put some of my ideas to use.