Once a student spun the spinner they had to determine which words the prefix could go with and why. Some of them were a lot harder than others but they all gave us good discussion.
Everything was laminated for easy write on-wipe off.
As we continue to inch closer to the STAAR, I try to focus a lot on strategies that will help my struggling readers be able to tackle the words on the page for the test, but also in LIFE. I think working with word parts is a really beneficial way to do that. One way we reinforce prefixes is the game below. This one came from the Kagan Balanced Literacy Grade 5 book but would be easily reproduced. Once a student spun the spinner they had to determine which words the prefix could go with and why. Some of them were a lot harder than others but they all gave us good discussion. Everything was laminated for easy write on-wipe off. As we got going with the game, we made a mini anchor chart for the definitions we decided on together.
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A strategy that has really been helping my intervention students is a system for previewing the passage to get a good idea of the main idea of the passage before they start reading. I think this has been successful because it has given them a way to see specifically what to focus on as they read the passage. Here is an example of us practicing this strategy. We are using a released 5th grade STAAR passage from TEA. We discussed focusing on the title (and subtitles, if any), the first one or two sentences, the underlined words, and the text features (which for this passage included a map and a diagram). We highlighted those things: From those highlighted pieces they came up with the gist of the main idea (listed below in green): This took about 2 minutes to accomplish and then they had a vision for what to focus on. When the article started to mention Canadian Geese, they didn't spend much time on that because they knew their main goal had more to do with Wood Frogs. This is a strategy that my students need because they are the ones who haven't been successful on STAAR before. So to provide them with tips for how to attack the passages has shown some success!
Struggling readers really benefit from learning about word parts. Just like when learning to read, when they start recognizing familiar word parts is opens up the meanings of new words. Some word part work lately focused on roots and has looked like this: I found this sort on The Curriculum Corner and I really like it. I printed the cards off on different colors to help keep the game organized. The blue cards are the root wards, the green ones are words that contain the root, and the pink cards are the definitions of the roots. The best way I found to use this sort was to layout all of the root words (blue cards). Then students found the words (green cards) that used the roots. From their knowledge of that example word, they talked it out to find the definition of the the roots (pink cards). Then they added the information to the answer sheet and as a group came up with one more example word that contained the root. We used the tree in the picture above to discuss several words with one root and how to determine what unknown words mean when we know the root. Note: **We found there was a mistake on one of the example word cards (green). The word "cyclops" is misspelled.**
We used dinosaurs to focus on reviewing text structure. The first two articles came from The Comprehension Toolkit- The Scoop on Dino Poop and Dozens of Dinos. For Dozens of Dinos we discussed that it was organized by describing the different types of dinosaurs and we chose three different dinosaurs to compete the description graphic organizer for. Once we completed that, we looked back over the graphic organizers to help us write a main idea sentence for the whole article. We reviewed the connection that text structure and organization can have with the main idea. The page we used to organize our thoughts is attached below.
For The Scoop on Dino Poop, we again discussed text structure. For this one we decided on description as well. We divided the article into three sections and completed a graphic organizer for each section. Once we did that, we came up with a subtitle for each of our sections and reviewed how the subtitles reflect the main idea. The graphic organizer page for dino poop article is attached below.
Next, we used an article from Tween Tribune about the movie The Good Dinosaur. (The BEST part of this website is that you can get the same article in four different Lexile levels. And all the differentiation spirits said "Amen".) The article can be found here. Before we read, we discussed 5 vocabulary words that they would find in the article and they highlighted them as they came to them while reading. We then discussed the cause-effect relationships we saw in the article and how the movie and the state of Wyoming are depending on each other to receive benefits. The cause-effect graphic organizer is attached below. That picture above is terrible so here's a screenshot of part of it. Some basic cause-effect they have to pull from the article and then a place for vocabulary. I had them write their thoughts for the word and highlight context clues for their evidence.
Our overall question that we used our cause-effect relationships for was: All in all, what is Wyoming hoping for? We looked back at each cause-effect graphic organizer and thought through what each was telling us about Wyoming. Several of them used the vocabulary words for this to tell me, "Wyoming wanted to promote tourism to their state to make more money." Some of them didn't quite get there without a lot of support, but they sure worked hard! Several times throughout the week, we reviewed text structure with some sorts. One sort included the key words for each and the other sort was the description as well as the graphic organizer that usually represents it. That one is attached here.
I was able to find several books in our library to go with our dinosaur fun. They loved them all! Life-Size Dinosaurs (bottom right) was really neat because the pages unfolded to show the actual size of different dinosaurs. (excuse the cords, we had a flood and everything is moved around and out of place) Another piece to this week was some "mini research". I have used this research technique with several different topics and it seems to work really well. I got the inspiration from the Dozens of Dinos article that I mentioned above. I have found that there are some topics that the kids are interested in researching but there just isn't enough information on the websites I trust for them to research. So for those topics, I make it into Mini Research. I find information that they can use online and then I print and glue onto file folders. I laminate them and have them for years to come. For the dinosaurs research, I found pictures, charts, graphs, and information on all of the dinosaurs mentioned in the article Dozens of Dinos. This way they already had at least a little bit of background knowledge. From the folders, the students were able to complete a research graphic organizer. This was a good ending for this week of quick and easy text structure review.
This week and the week after Spring Break, we are doing an overall review of strategies, tips, tricks, passages, questions, key words, academic vocabulary, etc, etc for STAAR (5th Grade). So we wanted to spice up our STAAR review a bit to make it a little more fun than passages + questions....so we created a KAHOOT! And the kids really did have fun. And they were READING for detail so that was a big plus. Another teacher gave me a copy of this: but I have no idea where it came from. I've looked on Pinterest and just googled, but can't find them. So we cut up the passages and laminated them. Each student had a copy of the passage. There were 9 in all and we would just give them each passage one at a time. UPDATE: I have been told the passages are from ereadingworksheets.com...which after looking around on that website, is a great resource for passages. We gave them time to read the passage, which only took a couple of minutes because all of the passages were so short. Then they answered questions about the passage on the KAHOOT! There were three questions for each passage which kept the game going at a great pace. I'll post a link to the KAHOOT! quiz below. KAHOOT! can be found here: Owning the STAAR For you to be able to use the KAHOOT!, you need to know which passages I used...so below you'll find pictures with a number that correlates to the KAHOOT! questions. I'm sure there's a better way to do this, but none of the passages had titles so I just thought I'd show you what they were. For Passage #9, we used a Shel Silverstein poem.
I love using Boggle like you see on Pinterest a lot for making words. I think that is a perfect thing to always have up and going in the classroom. Another take on that is called Crossword Cubes. This is somewhat the same concept. You shake the 13 die in the cup and spill them onto the table. From there, you build words as you would in a crossword. There are also point values given to each letter so you can add up points once you have done all you can.
(I found several styles of the game on Amazon and eBay.) |
Lessons & SeriesIntervention lessons and series of lessons designed for (but not limited to) 5th and 6th graders
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