Skip to main content

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. This 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 a five senses unit, as part of a weather unit, or even a book about relationships with family. 
  • Vocabulary - this unit introduces six vocabulary words using images, kid-friendly definitions, and sentences. Throughout the unit, we will act out the words, answer questions that connect to background knowledge, and graphic organizers. 
During Reading
  • Interactive Read-Aloud Questions - This unit is a shared reading unit.  What does that mean? That means the story is read aloud to the students and reread for close reading analysis.  The questions are planned out to hit multiple skills as you read aloud to them. 
    • First Read - What does the Text Say? (multiple skills)
    • Second Reading - How does the Text Work? (figurative language - onomatopoeia)
    • Third Reading - What does the Text Mean? (point of view)


After Reading

  • Students need a way to apply what we have discussed through the read-aloud. The after-reading activities have been carefully crafted and can be used for formative and summative assessments. What activities did I choose? 
    • Role on the Wall - analyzing character traits. 
    • Create your own Onamatopeia to match an illustration
    • Creating I AM poems - character point of view
    • Creating Sensory poems
    • Analyzing Sentence structure - looking at sentences and analyzing word parts for meaning.
To find the book, you can search your local library or purchase from Amazon at 

this link - Ten Ways to Hear Snow. 


To purchase the no-prep unit, visit my store The Other End of the Reading Rope. 





Leslie



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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
Post a Comment
Read more

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
Post a Comment
Read more