Anchor Charts

    We have one week before fall break....what?!?!? It has seriously been crazy around here! The weather is finally nice and we no longer have heat advisory days in AZ, what a relief! My reading block has been going so well this year and I must give most of that credit to my decision to use the Daily 5 and CAFE. Seriously, if you are debating whether or not to implement it in your classroom, just go for it! My English partner and I have introduce all of the Daily 5 activities and although it is not perfect, I feel so good when I just stand and look around the room and all of my students are engaged and focused on making themselves better readers. I will do another post later on on what I do for each Daily 5 component in more detail.
      I also had my first observation, which even though I feel extremely comfortable with our assistant principal being in my room, it's always a little nerve racking! In our school we are using the Marzano iobservations tool for everything. I took a big risk and decided to do a close reading activity with my 1st graders...completely in Spanish! It paid off because they did awesome and I felt like the past two months that I've spent building the foundation were all worth it. 
       Which brings me to this post...anchor charts! I honestly wish we had bigger rooms so that I could use anchor charts for almost everything and leave them up as long as possible. The big dilemma I have is that with two groups I can never truly create an anchor chart with the class unless I make two of them, which is so time consuming and I do not have the wall space! So, when I introduce a new CAFE strategy I create the charts with these awesome large post its and simply take those down with the other group, or I add to the chart with my second group. At the beginning my students were really struggling with checking for understanding, but as soon as we used the large post its and practiced together with a read aloud- it all made sense to them. So, I've been crazy about anchor charts because they are actually using them!

This is for checking for understanding (who and what):

This one is for using our schema:

 This one I made because for my PGP (professional growth plan) I decided to challenge myself and we're going to be really focusing on Hypothesizing during our learning (but I wanted to sort of introduce it little by little)

I laminated this one so that when we did our close reading and I wrote down the different types of questions and provided sentence stems for them to use.

I also created one for making inferences but I spaced it and didn't take a picture of it. I did however make this because for my observation we did our very first round of close reading!

 
 Since they have down what visualizing, checking for comprehension and making and inferences I knew that it was time to tie it all together with a close read.

 This is the passage we used (I wrote it using the vocabulary from our Spanish curriculum) and although it was tough- we got through it. On the left column they write the evidence from the text that answers a "tougher" question (that's how I explained it). Then on the right column they write/draw their schema that helps them answer that tough question. Then they can make an inference, I connected it to the math and explained it as

evidence from the text + schema =  inference

 The question I asked for the first passage was: Why is it a lot of work going to the market?
I am so excited to keep this up for the rest of the year and continue to use it. Here is the passage that we used the following week during our close reading. 

This next week will be full of assessments and meetings and assemblies and oh yes... a dance party! My favorite! The best thing is that I am not stressed about these assessments I have to give because we have built our stamina during the Daily 5 and they are working so independently it's actually kind of scary. Oh, some more good news: we will be getting iPads for our classroom next week! (More to come on that)