Vertical+Team-Reading

October 29,2014

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Al asked about recreating terminology for our campus, and I think the proof is in the pudding! The link above is a branch of the link that Al sent. When you follow the above link, you will be taken to a page that shows the 3rd grade TEK Objectives. On the right side of the page, there is a vocabulary bank in green and pin.

The green box is instructional words. If you click on a word from that list, the bottom of the page will produce the TEK objective which uses that particular word and how it drives the teacher's work. It will also pull up tabs for all grade levels so that you can see how each grade level changes.

T he pink box is the vocabulary for content. Again, click on the word in the box and you will see how the student will be responsible for that word in each grade level. For example, the first word is antonym. 3rd grade needs to identify and use an antonym, 4th grade needs to complete an analogy with an antonym, and 5th grade will need to produce an analogy with antonyms.

Reading Writing is always a vertical focus. This was, in fact, the topic of our last meeting.

Karen shared an engaging writing strategy with the group called Depth Charging. This is a good way to get students to add more details to a story. I performed a Google search and the following is a revised version of one teacher's explanation of depth charging. I think that this is a quick method with a potentially large payoff for struggling writers.

Students begin by writing a sentence about a topic. It can be a topic of their choosing or one assigned by the teacher. They take the sentence, circle a word that interests them, then write a sentence which expands on the word that was circled. The process is repeated with the new sentence, but this time a different word is circled.

Example/Original sentence: She was holding her baby doll.

New paragraph depth-charged: She was holding her __baby doll__. The doll was wearing a __blue dress__. The dress looked like Cinderella's ball gown, and it __sparkled__. The sparkles reminded her of the diamond on her mother's finger, which she hadn't seen since her mother died.

It allows students to add depth by focusing in on one thing, and it develops the idea. Obviously, this would be the rough draft, and then they go into what and where they want to combine sentences.

You can also get mini-lessons in there--similes, sentence combining, sensory images, flashback/anecdote, etc.

Students can use sticky notes to add to the original sentence, that way they can move the sentences around when they go into revising.