Hello Literacy Land Readers! Tara here, from Looney's Literacy! I've been a K-6 literacy interventionist for 11 years now! My how time flies when your having fun. Today I'm going to share some ideas and tricks I've tried over the years as I seek new ways to impact student engagement and critical thinking at each student's learning level.
Over the past five years or so my district has been working on implementing new state standards for curriculum, teacher evaluations and administrative evaluations. One of the changes we've seen includes the creation of Units of Instruction that show student growth. This took me a minute to wrap my brain around because it felt too restrictive. I couldn't imagine how I was going to adjust my instruction to meet the needs of all my learners and address all the other aspects of this type of planning.
As I dove head first into this seemingly impossible task I began to realize it can be done. Not only can it be done but it offered a whole new perspective on expectations and curriculum. As I walk you through the process I'll share some of the insights I gained and how I plan to use this method for future planning.
I choose to use my sixth group group as my guinea pigs. I decided to study the mystery genre because I found the perfect book, Chasing Vermeer by Blue Ballet. I set the time frame for 5 weeks. Then I determined the objectives of the unit of study by glancing at the 6th grade ELA curriculum.
At this point I was able to outline my scope and sequence using some general info from the
book (Chasing Vermeer) and our 6th grade ELA curriculum. Then came the fun part of employing my new found skill of asking essential question. I did a book study this past summer and used this for my professional development plan.
Then I was able to plan activities. I've learned over the years that my plans cannot be absolute and I must remain flexible as I adjust to learners' needs daily. This leaves a lot of activities undone so I rely heavily on storing things in my computer so I can print as needed.
Resources I used:
Instructional activities
Reading journal
Close Reading Sheet
Assessment - Formative & Summative
Running Records
ReadWorks - Chasing Vermeer Assessment
There were teachers in my building who were using this amazing close reading resource from TpT that I can't seem to remember who made but when I get back to my classroom I will reference back to. I adapted the lesson page to fit this particular group and it look like this: (Feel free to download)
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