Slowly But Surely...

I'm working with students to add explicit strategies to our strategies board over time. I want students to be able to take ownership of their own reading and transfer that to their classroom and independent reading. To do that, I have to arm them with tasks they can generalize from text to text. I took a note from "The Sisters" (Gail Boushey and Joan Moser) and their book, The Cafe Book. The idea is that students have a strategy board broken down into the parts of reading (C-Comprehension, A-Accuracy, F-Fluency, and E-Expand Vocabulary). Since my overall focus with my students is comprehension, I changed that and made the board based on the steps of accessing a text, but I don't have a cute little acronym for MY board.

Previewing

Reading

Re-Reading

Responding to Reading

Collaborating

As we're moving through the year, we're going to add explicit strategies to these parts of the board that give students something concrete to hold on to when they need to analyze a text. Each of these strategies is transferrable to other texts and can be used independently. We're adding on slowly, but with confidence.

Students have been taking over the process as well. Now I have them becoming the "teacher" and guiding us through our previewing. I'm going to start having them lead the summaries, too.

I'm hoping by the end of the year, they're doing my job for me! ;)