Becoming an Expert at a Book

All year, one the biggest habits that readers practice is to re-read their books to scoop up more words. This helps them make their voice smooth (fluent) and to also pick up new information from their book (comprehension).

We did just that and then MORE!

Our last two fiction reading units had similar concepts in them so we were able to dig deeper into the concepts that were being addressed. With my wonderful first graders ready to move up into second grade, we decided to take our oral conversations centered around our books and actually WRITE about it.

We all know that if you can say it, then you can write it.

Reader's workshop is where all of the work began. In every reader's workshop, it begins by having a mini lesson. The mini lesson was used to address the concept being taught and then students took out their expert book to practice the concept by talking about it to their learning partner. During this time, I was able to confer with students and teach in on any confusion they had. I also was able to push students to expand on their thinking by having them give support to why they were thinking that. They then took a few minutes to write down their thinking. For the remainder of reader's workshop, students read other fiction books and looked for the same concept that was addressed in the mini lesson.

Each child chose ONE expert book and zoomed in on...

• setting
• characters
• beginning, middle, end
• character's feeling
• character traits
• favorite part 

Why did I choose to do this?

• It gave me an opportunity to know the story that each child was reading from beginning to end so that I can help assess their thinking on skills being taught
• It allows students to talk about their books
• Students get to introduce their books to other friends which can encourage other students to read the book that they read
• Students become fluent with reading it and understand all parts of their book

When we were done, students all celebrated their hard work and put their expert book back into the leveled bins. Students couldn't wait to read a book that their friend read and talked about!

We added our hard work to the hallway!

A close up of what students did!

List-Group-Label

We have been closely studying our characters and describing the kind of person that they are in the books that we are reading. Throughout this unit we have brainstormed A LOT of character traits. We talked about how character traits describe who we are and what kind of person we are on the inside.

Looking at this huge list that we created, we decided to talk about how we can group words together. I started the discussion by grouping mean and rude together and I gave a reason to why I thought that they belonged together.

Students continued to lead the discussion by grouping character traits together. Students agreed and disagreed with each other for some character traits. For example, one student wanted curious to go over with smart and problem solver since this kind of person would always be interested in finding out more about something. Another student disagreed with this by saying that a curious person could be caught doing something that wasn't good and get in trouble.

After students agreed on the grouping, they decided to label each group. This is what we came up with!

The strategy that we used was LIST-GROUP-LABEL

• We created a list of character traits (across a few weeks in our read aloud time)
• We grouped the words together while providing support to why we were making that choice
• We labeled each group

For more information, visit...
http://www.readingrockets.org/strategies/list_group_label

This strategy is really fun to use within a Science or Social Studies unit! It helps build content knowledge and vocabulary.

Character Traits

We have been currently working in a fiction unit by closely studying characters in the books that we are reading. Our current reading unit goes hand in hand with our writing unit as students have developed a character and will write series of stories that include their character getting into trouble and out of trouble.

While using read alouds as our mentor texts, we kept track of character traits from the characters we were reading about in our books.

We then decided that characters in our books are very similar to us! Therefore, we have character traits too! Students brainstormed five character traits that best describe who they are as a person. They shared their ideas with their learning partner and gave reasons to why they believe they are that type of person. This will be an ongoing study for the remainder of the year.





How do students come up with character traits?
They watch their characters closely in their book for...

• how they act
• things they say
• what they are thinking

Why do students do this?

• to understand and get to know their character
• to predict what their character will do and how they will react to situations in their books