Day 3, Don't Think Too Much

I started the morning thinking about reading. I downloaded the Teacher's College learning progressions to look at the categories of skills they list for Narrative and Informational reading. I counted up all the skills, multiplied by 0.20 and had the number of anchor skills I needed to choose. I started looking through each section, reading about each one, struggling to decide which ones were the most important. I kept looking at the Literal Comprehension sections of each type of reading, and wondering how on Earth I was only going to choose a couple of those…and that’s when it hit me. The anchor skills I choose should only come from the literal comprehension section. If there is no literal comprehension, you can’t analyze nor interpret! So, for informational reading (16 total skills, 4 anchor skills):

Orientating
Monitoring for Sense
Building Vocabulary
Main Idea

Narrative (18 skills, 4 anchor skills)

Story Elements: Time, Plot, Setting
Fluency: The sound of my voice.
Envisioning/Predicting
Monitoring for sense: Fitting the pieces together.

After I chose those skills, I created a Google Doc that has just those skills (grade level description ... which makes me now think I need to have a progression document!) and then I unpacked what I thought was the content of those skills that the students would need to have access to in order to do the work. For example, if a child does not know what motivation is, or what types of motivation there are, then they would not be able to talk about or pay attention to, or figure out what the motivation of characters are!

Nos vemos mañana!