June 07, 2016
As you sip your iced tea on a hot summer day over the next couple of months, think about saving your iced tea containers for this very cool lesson and activity. It focuses on explicitly teaching how to recognize feelings and emotions in literature and in life. The explicit teaching of recognizing feelings in literature and in our interactions with others is imperative in our schools and in life. The above standards and quotes emphasize the importance of our need to help students identify feelings, recognize them in others, and make the connection to critical thinking and inference via the Critical Thinking Triangle. The SGM iconic structure is a concrete way to develop this necessity...
May 31, 2016
This next written retell of Too Many Tamales is by Ray, a student in Grade 5. We’ve included a typed version of his writing, an analysis and a conference suggestion for use during the Writing Process. The descriptive details in Emma’s writing (see May 13 blog) and the use of story grammar components indicating advancing structure and content are evident—but to a lesser degree—in Ray’s sample.
May 24, 2016
May 20, 2016
In today’s classrooms, students are being asked to comprehend more complex materials in earlier grades with a particular emphasis on expository texts. The blending of both narrative and expository texts in many reading selections make understanding these structures a cornerstone for student comprehension success. The iconic structure of the SGM® provides a concrete visual and tactile scaffold to teach these structures to children. The expository text structures “tie in” to the narrative sequence. The “Core” of the Core manual explains this connection in detail showing how each narrative stage facilitates thinking about information (expository) structures.
May 13, 2016
The following is an analysis of Emma’s written expression of Too Many Tamales. (See previous blog, Analyze A Narrative Written Sample.) Emma’s third grade teacher considered her to be among the top writers in the class and we agree! We’ve included a typed version of her writing, an analysis and a conference suggestion for use during the Writing Process. In our conferencing points, we included mapping using samples of the Story Grammar Marker® iconic maps. If you are not familiar with our Data Collection tools, we have a wide variety to accommodate student needs and your intervention goals. There are also student tools that will assist students in assessing their own work. Below is a sampling of how I would approach conferencing with Emma...
May 10, 2016
In a recent blog for Cinco de Mayo, we posted the analysis of the book, Too Many Tamales. (Previous blog.)
Too Many Tamales is quite complex in terms of its content. The reader needs to be attentive to the illustrations as well as the text itself. Complexity of a text poses challenges to students and instructors alike. There are several measures of complexity of text. They are: Lexile Measures, Qualitative Complexity and Knowledge of the competence of the student as reader/listener in order to match him/her to text and task. (Please see references below for further study.) As instructors and interventionists, we are constantly attentive to these measures...