Workshop Wednesday: Reading Response with a Freebie!

I’m linking up with Jivey over @ Ideas by Jivey for her weekly Workshop Wednesday linky- this week’s topic is something near and dear to my heart- reading response! 

Ok, seeing that my job is 100% focused on literacy, this post has the potential to be never-ending, so I’m only going to choose one reading response activity I use with my little friends because otherwise it would just be overwhelming. 🙂  I do tons of reading response activities on our iPads, MacBooks, graphic organizers and through all sorts of materials, but I’ll save those other reading response ideas for another day (or you can check out other ideas that I already have on this blog by clicking “reading response” in the little list of all our posts in our sidebar)! 

This reading response activity is an ‘oldie but goodie’ reading response activity- it is my Story Map Board! Now, this is not an original idea- if you search Story Maps on Pinterest that’ll most likely lead you to some blogs where I got the idea from a few years ago. (I’m just not personally sure which one led me to create my own- but I appreciate the many ideas out there that made me make it!) I love using this Story Map with my little friends for a number of reasons- it is very straight forward and simple for the students to respond to while adding a visual component, it keeps my students engaged and it is evident right away if my students are understanding our story or not! 

I unfortunately for some reason do not have any pics of this Story Map actually in action, but basically my little friends are drawing or writing their responses to the various topics on the Story Map on post it notes/notecards/whatever paper is around.  We do reading response everyday so I switch up our activity more or less each day and my little friends just love the chance to write on post it notes!  We either “stop & think” as we read and fill out our post it notes or we read the whole story and then complete the Story Map at the end.  Once the Story Map is completed with my little friends’ post it notes stuck on there, we review what happened in the story by going through each post it note.  After my little friends have gotten used to the Story Map when working on it with me, I have them complete it as a reading response activity in centers with a partner/group. 

This aligns perfectly with our graphic organizer “Can I tell you a story?” that my little friends can then fill out on their own after we’ve done the Story Map together several times…you can grab your own free copy here! 

This still counts as one reading response activity- just done in a few different ways– you have to have options, right?! 🙂