InstaDigest: Sept. 18-Sept. 29
What we've done for the last two weeks + what it looked like
Friends, this is the last day of Free Content for All September. I hope you’ve found some useful resources to make your class even better this year! If you’d like to keep all this content coming (and you are not going to want to miss a whole e-book that I’m sharing next weekend!) , please consider subscribing today!
Okay. Now we’re really in it. We’ve gotten through the first couple weeks, the team-building days, Back to School Night (I made stations for parents this year — would you like them!?). And now it feels like we are fully, irrevocably back in school.
Here’s something I want to point out when you look at my plans: you’ll notice my students are beginning with independent reading every day this year. This is a change. In the past, I have rotated our warm-up, soft-start activity between independent reading, notebook time writing, field note work, and read aloud.
It just wasn’t working anymore.
Last year, I discovered the only thing that consistently kept my students engaged with their independent reading books was giving them time to read daily. If I did that, they would read at other times of the day, too. And at home. And on the weekends. If I didn’t give them that time, they never, ever got hooked.
So, I had to decide what was my top priority, and independent reading came out on top. But, I’m not ditching the others. They are important, too! I’m just weaving them into the other work we are already doing. I’m using Notebook Time-style writing warmups periodically after independent reading time, and specifically to frontload idea generation before a larger piece of writing. (The notebook time entries become like little mini-laps in the style of Gallagher and Kittle.) I’m doing read aloud each Friday as First Chapter Friday (and there will be other times throughout the year that I read a whole-class text aloud.) And, as you can see, field notes are becoming single-day classwork tied to independent and whole-class reading.
Okay. Let’s see what we’ve been up to for the last two weeks:
What We Did
What It Looked Like
Of course we'd love to see the parent stations!
Would also like to see how your single-day field notes go.
PS: I keep looking back at your folder of nonfiction articles. Any likelihood you'll be adding articles in there? I haven't found found more engaging articles anywhere else.
I’ve noticed the same thing with independent reading! The only way to build outside school reading habits.... is daily time reading in school. Every time I think, oh, they’ve built the habit, I can do a little less in school reading.... the outside school reading goes down.
One thing I’m doing differently this year is having students do a short (1-2 minute) “Do Now” in their notebooks BEFORE they settle into reading. Then we go over the Do Now after reading. Generally, the do now is some level of sentence study (sometimes just noticing, sometimes comparing sentences, sometimes imitating-- I’ve been using things from the middle school version of Patterns of Power a lot). Tucking it into those first two minutes of class has been amazing-- it’s like this little minute of hidden time that I’ve just stolen back: those two minutes were necessary anyway for settling in before reading, and now there’s something concrete to do, and when they finish reading again it only takes a few minutes to go over the Do Now, but they are already primed for it.