This year one of my goals as a teacher was to really improve our reading comprehension lessons. Our district is focused on reading comprehension and writing in response to literature so I wanted to be out in front of these initiatives. More importantly, I wanted to give my students the tools and knowledge necessary to be great readers. Our instruction in comprehension was lacking so we created Read It Up! And the results have been tremendous. We just wrapped up Read It Up: The Old Lady Who Swallowed A Chick and I’m excited to share our results!
The Old Lady Who Swallowed A Chick
This book is a must read for spring and Easter. My students are obsess with the Old Lady books. I love that these books have simple text but can be used to engage our readers in great comprehension skills and academic conversations!
Reading Comprehension: Old Lady Who Swallowed A Chick
We start our Read It Up by sequencing the story. After our read aloud, we retell the story using pictures. As we retell, the students retell the story orally including transition words and details.
After creating our graphic organizer, students create their own flow map. To differentiate this activity, students can complete the sequencing on their own and then you could use that to create the graphic organizer.
Another major focus of our reading comprehension is our oral retelling. We use our story map to retell the story including transition words.
Here is a video of this lesson in action in the classroom:
Each Read It Up also focuses on a particular comprehension skill. For The Old Lady Who Swallowed A Chick, we focused on how fiction stories can also have elements that are real. We list real and fantasy elements of the story. And then student write and draw about real and fantasy elements!
Response To Literature: Writing
Each Read It Up also provides students the opportunity to respond to literature through writing. This also helps them make connections. The writing is scored or assessed using the included rubrics.
For this story, we wrote about what we might swallow if we were the old lady. After we pose the writing question, we do a turn and talk. Students discuss what they would swallow and give reasons to swallow their item.
Read It Up: Grammar
We also include a grammar lesson in each Read It Up. Grammar is a focus standard for our school (based on data) so it’s something we’ve been working on more in kindergarten. For The Old Lady Who Swallowed A Chick we learned prepositions. The students had to listen to a statement and place the chick in the correct place!
Here is a video of this lesson in action in the classroom:
Read It Up: Graphing
Each Read It Up includes a graphing lesson. Since the Old Lady swallowed some candy, we graphed our feelings on jelly beans. Each student votes using a Post-It Note. BUT they have to speak in a complete sentence and give reasons they like or don’t like jelly beans.
For more on our Read It Up creations and reading comprehension, check out these posts:
