Thursday, January 29, 2015

Reading Menus

The past week or so I took to Twitter to regain some inspiration. I have regained a lot! First of all I want to blog a lot more often, but in shorter chunks. Second I decided to revamp my reading and writing block into something that resembles workshops combined with some Daily 5 structures.
To dive into this I figured I would use reading choice menus. I am not sure what I’ll call them, because they go by many names. I gave out one to students that I had found and made no changes to because it accomplished what I wanted this week anyway.
On the first day the students were told they were to select a nonfiction book of their choice, read it, and complete $50 off the menu. The one I had chosen was broken down by price of nonfiction reading response activities. Immediately the students began doing items from the menu without having read a book. Part of this was due to excitement and part due to the fact you can probably do a lot of nonfiction responses by skimming and scanning without reading an entire book. I facilitated, gritted my teeth and watched things not go entirely as planned. Many students weren’t sure what to do, they began acting out, complaining, or just doing other things. Eventually, most of them got it together and gained some direction in terms of text they were going to work with and which assignments they might try.
Day two went a lot better. Students had direction, and began working on assignments. I circulated asking questions and providing feedback on their work. When we both ended up lost and needing some direction I would suggest they go back and just read some of the book. One huge success I noticed on day two was the poems that students began writing. One option was for students to write poems about the topic. I had a student on day one write a poem about elephants around the whole “Roses are red, violets are blue” style. It rhymed, but the book wasn’t about elephants and it didn’t demonstrate any comprehension of the text. On day two students began writing acrostic poems or looking up poems on the similar topics online and trying to create their own. One set of students were looking for example poems on diamonds and found out how to write a diamante poem. So they began work on writing one of those about a diamond.
Now, things are going great yet, but there has been a lot of improvement in two short days. I can’t wait to see what a whole week brings as I make adjustments to the assignments and time frames. The kids are getting excited and taking advantage of the choice being provided. Hopefully this will continue to grow.