Toad-ally Exceptional Learners: September Show and Tell

September 20, 2016

I'm linking up for this month's view into my classroom with"Forever in 5th Grade's" Show and Tell.

Student's have been back for 30 some odd days. Most of our time in small groups has been spent building routines and learning how "Parts to Whole" can help us read and write.

An important thing for student's is they need to show how each of them created meaning strategically of the digraphs. These guys have spend the last couple weeks learning and working with digraphs in reading and writing. The point is to get them to use higher order thinking to demonstrate how they created meaning i.e-how will they remember them as they move on to more complicated reading and phonics work.

Each group has it's own fluency challenge. From letter names to high frequency words a differentiated fluency game based on the same idea. Even with spending most of our time on phonics, spelling and reading have to be a fluency practice. My groups beg, for time to do "Up Against the Wall." I've put the data on the wall next to the posters using their data binder numbers. My hope is that by working on sight words their grade level oral reading scores will increase. (By this spending less time on them as a whole.)

I have decided to take the big step to move my lesson planning to Google. This is week 3 and I LOVE it. I have Google Slides Lesson Plans for each group. Each week I make a copy of the plan and make my changes. I can take pictures of student work and up-load it to their file. It does help students have binders they keep everything in guided reading books, their data, everything.

Just because they have been working on phonics doesn't mean they don't real, authentic text. This group is working on putting all their strategies together. They have worked "parts to whole" with sounds and letters to figure out how to break apart words. They are seeing how this strategy is WAY better than guessing.