We will be reading in a class read aloud together and reading fiction and nonfiction selections from of our reading book. We will review reading strategies that good readers do such as visualizing, checking and monitoring for understanding, predicting, questioning, connecting to the text, and rereading parts of the text to gain deeper meaning. Also, we will be reading shorter nonfiction articles and stories from StoryWorks,. This will help us continue to practice our reading strategies as well as practice nonfiction reading strategies to pull out detailed meaning using nonfiction text features and text structure to deepen our meaning. While we read, we will be working on stopping and jotting our active reading thinking to help increase our detailed reading comprehension. When we can write about reading, it greatly increases our comprehension of what we read.
Writing- We will start with writing in response to reading with answering some short answer questions and reviewing paragraph structure.
Please make sure you always have a couple of chapter books that you enjoy reading. We will read everyday to ourselves to help us build our reading stamina. You may get them from the library or bring them in from home.
Reading strategies that good readers use at all times to help us be an active thinkers as we read and understand what we are reading are:
visualizing our "movies in our mind
thinking about what we read- what does that make us think of?
questioning as we read
predicting what may happen next based on the text
connections that it reminds us of that we have read about before, watched on a show, something in our lives or a friend's life, etc...
paying attention to new words that we can build our vocabulary
Parent Reading and Writing reference info below:
We are working on some comprehension strategies throughout our units such as visualizing our "movie in our minds", checking for understanding (self monitoring), and listening to our "inner voice" in our heads as we read. These strategies are really important to use whenever we read as it helps improve our detail comprehension.
In our units, we will be practicing other reading strategies that help us become better readers and thinkers while we are reading and reading to learn the topic. This reading and thinking "conversation" with our books is important to help our comprehension. We call the actual reading of the book pages our "reading voice" which is simply just reading the pages. Our strategies such as predicting, checking for understanding, questioning the story, using context clues for unknown words, and other strategies that make us think about the book... we call our "thinking voice". We will first discuss our reading thinking and then start to record our conversation known as our "thinking voice" as we read post it notes and graphic organizers. As we have our "thinking voice" conversations, we stop and jot them down. Once we move a visual chart we will start to record on our own more as it reminds us that we need to pick strategies as we need to help us understand what we are reading. We don't use all strategies every time we read; however, we need to be able to pick strategies that help us when we don't understand something or self monitor for help our understanding of the text. We will start to train our brains to "think" about what we are reading and not just reading the words. :) Our last voice that we need to be able to recognize is our "distracting voice". This is the voice that random off topic thoughts pop into our head like "when's lunch" as we read. Learning about and practicing our self monitoring strategies will help us focus back in our reading and reread the part we were listening to our "distracting voice" to make sure we didn't miss something and understand what we are reading. Using all of these "voices" together is key to unlocking our comprehension as we read.
As we review short answer comprehension questions, we are practicing our "AWESOME answers" for our short answer comprehension questions together.
"AWESOME Answers" Checklist for complete and detailed answers:
rephrase the question
find the text evidence that answers the question
add it in your answer with complete thoughts & sentences on all parts of the question
capital letters and punctuation