Since Rita and I have the luxury of team teaching, we used that opportunity to work with small groups on sentence structure and other grammar skills this week. We administered a pre-assessment (after a flipped lesson on sentence structure) and used the data from the pre-assessment to put students into groups based on their knowledge.
Rita worked with students who needed a refresher on run-on sentences and sentence fragments. It was a two day process that obviously helped the students because the results from today's post-assessment were very good. While Rita worked with that group, I read with a small, self-selected group of students reading picture books that pertain to the Holocaust. There are so many excellent picture books that help build background knowledge about the Holocaust and that help develop empathy for the time period. I read The Butterfly by Patricia Polacco, Terrible Things by Eve Bunting, and The Cats of Krasinski Square by Karen Hesse. Each period we talked about the books and what we noticed about the writer's craft.
Today, I worked with a small group of students in each class on the four sentence structures, while Rita finished up with her group on fragments and run-ons. The students who weren't in either group, read independently - most of whom chose Holocaust or World War II books to build even more background knowledge about the time period.
I was pleased with how the small group instruction went this week. It takes a lot of preparation, thinking and planning to make this type of instruction work, but it is something that Rita and I are committed to doing. Using the workshop model for both reading and writing instruction is vital to our 8th grade classroom.
Rita worked with students who needed a refresher on run-on sentences and sentence fragments. It was a two day process that obviously helped the students because the results from today's post-assessment were very good. While Rita worked with that group, I read with a small, self-selected group of students reading picture books that pertain to the Holocaust. There are so many excellent picture books that help build background knowledge about the Holocaust and that help develop empathy for the time period. I read The Butterfly by Patricia Polacco, Terrible Things by Eve Bunting, and The Cats of Krasinski Square by Karen Hesse. Each period we talked about the books and what we noticed about the writer's craft.
Today, I worked with a small group of students in each class on the four sentence structures, while Rita finished up with her group on fragments and run-ons. The students who weren't in either group, read independently - most of whom chose Holocaust or World War II books to build even more background knowledge about the time period.
I was pleased with how the small group instruction went this week. It takes a lot of preparation, thinking and planning to make this type of instruction work, but it is something that Rita and I are committed to doing. Using the workshop model for both reading and writing instruction is vital to our 8th grade classroom.