As a reading specialist, I love teaching all things reading everyday! I do a combination of pull out and push in small groups with the kindergartners and 1st graders at my school. I will post activities that I do with both grade levels and hopefully you will find the posts meaningful and useful for your classroom. I incorporate technology on a regular basis in my teaching, so I hope you have the opportunity to use some of my ideas as well with whatever technology you have available in your classroom.
Common Core Alignment: CCSS. ELA- Literacy. RI.K.1:
With prompting and support, ask and answer questions about key details in a text.
Responding to reading is a major part of my small group lessons so I regularly try to incorporate different resources to make responding interesting and informative. This activity focused on the visualizing strategy, as it is our focus for the month of November. I used an app which I love for a variety of activities, ShowMe* (an interactive whiteboard app). In this lesson, I first did a brief think aloud where I told a short story and drew a picture on the iPad as I spoke.
I then read the students a story while hiding it within a file folder so they could not see any pictures from the story. The students then drew on the ShowMe app as I read and afterward we discussed what they included in their pictures.
I then had them record their voices telling about their visualization. This is a great feature of ShowMe because then if you are unable to meet with each student (if you use this in a center, for example) you can later listen to their understanding of the story. To wrap up the lesson, I showed the students the pictures from the story and we then discussed how our pictures were the same/different. Visualizing lessons provide great insight into students’ comprehension of a story.
*This app is also great for any other sort of reading response where you may ask the students to draw a picture of the characters, setting, etc. I also like using it for practicing letters and making words.
Have a great day!
Aylin
2 Responses
This app is free, right?! I haven't heard of it, but I want it! What an amazing lesson idea for visualizing.:)
Kristin
iTeach 1:1
Yes, this app is free- thanks for mentioning that!