Week 28-
 DRA Recording Sheet  

For all those administrators out there I am sharing a useful recording sheet that my teacher's helped me create.  This sheet is turned in with DRA levels each trimester.  I use these to help me see which students are progressing and which ones have stalled.  This helps guide our next steps as a staff.  Teachers also find them useful because they can see how their graph shifts over as students progress.             

                                                                                                                                                       

Weeks 26-27-
Small group instruction

Our staff has been really focusing on small group instruction and how to best meet all the needs of the students.  In Café our staff has become really good at conferring with individual students and setting goals with them.  We are finding that some students are stalling with moving up in their DRA level, so we are looking at how to pull small groups to provide explicit support with skills to help students progress.  One teacher shared a great resource to start setting up groups(see picture below).  We are embarking on a school-wide focus on small group strategy groups.  I will post more as we unpack the conversation.

Weeks 22-25--
Anchor Charts

Anchor Charts are a great way to document the work you do in your mini-lessons.  These charts can be used as resources for students as they work independently in Daily 5 or Café.  The rule of thumb with these charts is...if the students don't use them, take them down.  Over the past few weeks, I have taken pictures of anchor charts to share some ideas.        

 

                                                                                                                                                    

Week 21- Author's Point Of View

My 6th grade teacher did a mini-lesson on Author's Point of view.  He used an article from the St. Petersburg Times about Florida schools allowing cell phones in class.  This was a short piece of text so he could focus the lesson on determining the Author's Point of View (POV) by citing text evidence.  He read the text aloud and then had the students underline words/phrases from the text that would show the author's POV.  He then had them use the sentence fames(see chart below) to write out their ideas about the author's POV.  It was a short, but meaningful lesson to kick off the study of POV.

Week 20- Nonfiction

This chart shows a great way to teach about Nonfiction.

 

Getting kids to stop, slow, down and think about their thinking will help them understand what they are reading- especially with nonfiction material.

Week 18 and Week 19- DRA

It is progress report time, so many of the teachers have been busy doing DRAs on their students.  At our staff meeting, we discussed the summary portion of the DRA for levels 28 and 38.  28 is where the students have to begin to write a summary with some sentence frames.  Levels 38/40 is where the students have to write the summary without any sentence starters.  Our 2nd- 6th grade staff shared strategies that they use to help teach their students summary.  One very useful strategy is the five finger retell (that a lot of our primary teachers use too!) .  This helps the students remember the parts of the story to summarize.

Another strategy is to use a graphic organizer( see below) as an instructional tool to teach the students how to summarize.

Week 17

Comprehension- Inferring

This week my leadership team and I had the opportunity to go on Walk Throughs around the campus.  It was great to see that all of our K-2 classes have their Daily 5 rotations running smoothly and our 3rd-6th grade classes have Café going.  One of our 5th grade teachers was modeling an inference lesson.  She had the students bring their HM anthology with them to the carpet.  They were working on inferring a character's feeling.   She had a chart that had the below information on it...
Inferences
*How does a character feel?
*How do we know it?

________felt ___________because_________________
(name)           (emotion)                   (reason/clues)

The teacher read aloud the first two pages of Dear Mr. Henshaw to her class.  They discussed how the character was felling and why.  The teacher did a great job probing the students deeper with their thinking by asking them to justify their thinking from the text.  These types of lesson will help us transition our students to thinking critically with evidence to support their thinking!