Tag Archives: 3rd

Primary Document Based Questions

I have finally created a section with our primary Document Base Questions on http://www.63000resources.com. In February I wrote about Angela Orr and Chris Hayes’ first efforts and shared their first drafts (here). That was then and Washoe teachers have expanded … Continue reading

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ELA Mini Assessments

This is a belated post on the Mini Assessments (MA) we used in Session 3 or the Core Task implementation Project. The MA’s can be used to formatively gauge student growth on important literary dispositions including working with academic vocabulary; … Continue reading

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Literacy Unit Project, Session 3

Third through fifth grade teachers continued to make progress on developing literacy units, mapped to essential understandings, that stretch across all three grades. Those EUs have been finalized and include: How does conflict and compromise shape culture? How does setting … Continue reading

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Every Child Reading–Dr. Margie Gillis Presentation

In case you missed it, you can access an October 28th presentation by Dr. Margie B. Gillis on helping Kindergarten through 3rd grade students with reading. Dr. Gillis is the president of Literacy How, Inc. and research affiliate, Haskins Laboratories … Continue reading

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New Resources at www.63000resources.com

A number of new links were added to http://www.63000resources.com including: Free K-8 passages by reading level (here) Common Core Implementation Guide for School-Level Leaders from the Aspen Institute (here) Graphic organizer to practice textual evidence (here) K-5 Writing Rubrics  (here) … Continue reading

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New Close Reading Exemplar: We are the Ship

Cathy Schmidt, Elementary Training Coordinator with Striving Readers, has written the following close reading exemplar for an excerpt from Kadir Nelson’s book, “We are the Ship: The Story of Negro League Baseball.” We currently have the exemplar tagged to the … Continue reading

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Increasing Students’ Engagement with Complex Texts

If you have been looking for informational texts for elementary students, the following free resource might help. FYI for Kids is a collection of magazine articles to increases “students’ engagement and proficiency with complex text.” The digital collection features a menu … Continue reading

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Teaching Annotation

Annotation seems to be a popular subject judging from the email I received asking for direction with this instructional approach. The following might help. In an article that appeared in The Reading Teacher, Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey describe a … Continue reading

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‘How to Annotate’

A popular request from the Instructional Practice Guide session were the annotations posters featured in the intermediate grade video (here). Although we do not have copies of the posters, we did capture images of the posters and have posted them … Continue reading

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New Close Reading Exemplar Added

We completed a close reading exemplar for the poem, “The Story of Fidgety Philip” by Heinrich Hoffman. We have it fitted for the 3rd grade level. Some see the poem, written in 1845, as one of the first documentations of … Continue reading

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