Inferring character's feelings

I love stories which have the character's feelings change over time. I got this idea from Emily Kissner's blog http://emilykissner.blogspot.com/ She used Shortcut by Donald Crews as the mentor text to help children infer the character's feelings throughout the story. I used her lesson on my Smartboard.

The children all had a copy of the story map as well.

We also discussed the narrative elements for this simple story using Beth Newingham's Story Mountain

http://blogs.scholastic.com/top_teaching/2011/02/my-february-top-ten-list-resources-and-lessons-for-reading-fiction.html

The kids LOVED that you could move the yellow star on the Smartboard to show the rising action, climax and falling action of the story. Great lesson, thanks Emily. Christine

Beth Newingham writing lessons

We have been working on great leads for writing personal narratives. This post by Beth Newingham was awesome! Christine
http://blogs.scholastic.com/top_teaching/2011/01/my-january-top-ten-list-writing-lessons-and-resources.html

Have You Filled A Bucket Today?

http://blogs.scholastic.com/top_teaching/2010/04/are-your-students-bucket-fillers.html 

We discussed this wonderful book on our Professional Development Day. I have posted the link to Beth Newingham's blog post. I love what she does with this book. I also think its a great choice for the One School One Book program. Christine

http://www.reading.org/General/Publications/ReadingToday/RTY-0912_one_school.aspx

Genre labels

I got these off of Beth Newingham's website last summer. I bought these buckets at the dollar store and spent some time organizing my books. I have used this system all year now and I have to say I am really pleased with it. The books stayed fairly organized all year. On the corner of each book I wrote a little code ..ex: AH for American History and M for Mystery. When a child suddenly found out they were interested in mysteries they had a place to go to look for more.http://hill.troy.k12.mi.us/staff/bnewingham/myweb3/index.htm

Beth Newingham

More about Beth Newingham's website. I loved these theme posters. Throughout the year I would have the children add small copies of the covers of books we had read next to the theme. What is important here is that some books had more than one theme. We would discuss which theme was the strongest or just put the picture in both themes. We added picture books, paperbacks and even stories from our Houghton Mifflin (Trophies) reading series. Be sure to explain that their are MANY themes in stories. These are just some of the most popular ones. Its a great way to look back at all of the reading you did when the year is coming to an end. Christine

favorite websites for teachers

My alltime favorite website for teachers is Beth Newingham's site: http://hill.troy.k12.mi.us/staff/bnewingham/myweb3/index
If you can't get to her site from this then just google her name. She is awesome! Last summer I printed out her templates for organizing books according to theme. I was really happy with the way they worked out. Here are some other websites I like: http://www.hollynowalk.com/, http://www.mrsrenz.net/, http://www.mandygregory.com/ Christine