Twas the Night Before Christmas

One of my favorite traditions as a child, was to sit and listen to this famous poem snuggled up with my mom or grandmother. They both introduced me to the beautiful artwork that went with this poem, by GrandMa Moses, and we spent hours looking at the tiny details in her paintings.

Most teachers like to take a break for the daily grind right before the holidays. When I have looked for resources before, they are usually very cute and very fun! While I love cute and fun, as a Reading Specialist I want to add meaningful to the list as well.

This unit is designed to take five days. You will read two stories about the Night Before Christmas - one is the actual poem and is told from the viewpoint of the father in the house. The second is told from a mouse's perspective - a lonely mouse none the less. Each story has two days of shared reading in which we explore multiple skills - Characters, Setting, Events and Perspective/Point of View. It is a two day close read for each book.

Since my units are based on the Other End of the Reading Rope - Language Comprehension, they will include:

Ways to elicit and build background knowledge

Vocabulary words and strategies

Sentence Structure analysis

Verbal Reasoning and Visible Thinking

Written responses

Interactive Read Alouds

Another added bonus with my products is integration of another subject area. For this, I chose to integrate the visual arts of GrandMa Moses.

We will look at several of her paintings and work together on a critical thinking task to notice and note what is happening in the pictures.

I am also working on two other Christmas Resources that will be release soon. One is more for 4-5th grade and deals more with helping others and historical fiction of Patricia Polacco. The other is my absolute favorite arts integrated unit - Using the Nutcracker! Stay tuned!

Follow me on Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/theotherendofthereadingrope/

Follow me on TPT:

Comments

A New Way of thinking about comprehension

How many times have we, teachers, worried about testing to determine whether our students understand a comprehension skill or strategy? In LETRS, Moats and Tolman talk about the many hidden mental activities that happen in comprehension. In other words, comprehension is more of a process than a product. Well, that makes sense. So what are those processes of comprehension ? Monitoring comprehension - my favorite strategy for this is STP (Stop, Think, Paraphrase) Reading with appropriate pace - pacing actually correlates to understanding text Making inferences as you read - what are the characters thinking or feeling? Making a mental model to organize thinking and understanding Making connections in the text with views and background knowledge How can we support those processes of comprehension? Reading multiple texts around one topic helps to build background knowledge. In another blog I will talk moe about this critical component of learning. A final component that will b

Isolated Skills or Multiple Skills?

We are coming off about ten years of teaching skills in isolation. At the time, it seemed like a sound idea. Struggling with the main idea? Spend more time on the main idea. We spent a lot of time focused on three-week units around one skill. But what teachers noticed was, it didn't work! They still didn't get the main idea!!! Fast forward to 2019 and the Science of Reading movement....the first book I read that changed my thinking was Natalie Wexler's the Knowledge Gap. I will spend another blog post synthesizing takeaways from this later. In all honesty, this book made sense to me. Why weren't the kids getting these skills in isolation? We had taught many, many lessons on them! Wexler says it's not because of the skill, it has more to do with the information in the text they are reading. If you have no background knowledge, then you can't decipher the meaning of the text. Students need to be exposed to multiple skills in a passage or st

Winter Read Aloud using the Science of Reading for Comprehension

Winter Read Aloud I found this book recently and fell in love with it for many reasons - family relationships diverse family (from Lebanon) sensory details - which connects to onomatopoeias character traits and points of view and most of all SNOW... In switching from the old idea of reading multiple books for exposure to isolated skills, I designed this mini-unit around the fundamentals of the comprehension side of the Science of Reading. Verbal reasoning is woven into the unit in several ways. T his unit includes opportunities for inferencing as well as Visible Thinking Routines like See, Think, Wonder , and the Circle of Viewpoints. Some are used to build background knowledge and some are used to reflect on the learning. The lessons are broken into three parts - Before Reading Background Knowledge - this book can be read in isolation or with other winter read-aloud books to build knowledge about a snowy day. You could read this before a big snowstorm, as part of

The OTHER end of the Reading Rope - science of reading

Search This Blog