***I sent 2 emails last week about a “Listen to Reading” parent activity. If you did not receive those email or are interested in learning more about this fun opportunity, please email me! Thanks!
Spring Break is a great opportunity to get in some extra reading time with your child! When you read out loud to your child, you are providing a model of what fluent reading sounds like. Similarly, reading out loud allows you to model comprehension skills. Try doing a “think aloud” as you read to show your child how you build comprehension (Ex: “The author doesn’t tell me that Sam feels embarrassed, but it does say that Sam’s cheeks turned red and he wanted to hide under his desk. Sometimes when I feel embarrassed, my cheeks turn red and I feel like hiding, too.”) It will probably feel a little cheesy at first, but it pays off. We do “think alouds” in class all the time and it is an excellent way to identify and practice the strategies that good readers use to understand what they read.
This week we are learning about “thin” questions versus “thick” questions. “Thin” questions often have answers that are “right there” in the text (Who is the main character? When does this story take place? Where does this story take place? What is the problem?). They are great for checking for basic comprehension. “Thick” questions are more implicit and require readers to combine text evidence with their schema (Why…? How…?). These questions might have more than one correct answer and are open-ended. “Thick” questions push readers to analyze the text and think more deeply about what they read. These are the types of questions we want to challenge our students with! I’m attaching a list of “thick” question starters for you to use as you read at home with your child. These would be great to pull out during Spring Break in order to prepare for our upcoming final FAIR assessment in April. Happy reading!
As mentioned in this week’s Fridge Notes, here is a website with a list of multicultural Cinderella stories that you might want to hunt down during your next trip to the public library: http://www.ala.org/offices/resources/multicultural
Challenge Spelling Words: Words that End with -er (F)
Our schedule was CRA-ZY last week with all our show rehearsals, so we will work on last week’s “Juicy Word of the Week” (elegant) this week.