This week, students began their interactive reading journals, which they'll use to annotate and engage with the texts they'll read this year. In addition to building their skills as active readers, interactive notebooks also provide students with a personalized space for them to record, process, and reflect on information. Students also continue to develop their executive functioning skills as they cut and paste their inserts, organize their notes, and design pages that reflect how their brain has interpreted the information.
Our first unit is on our Summer Reading, Third Grade Angels by Jerry Spinelli. Students began a Cognitive Content Dictionary, where they will make predictions, discover the definition, and write or draw an example to help them remember the new reading terms they're learning. We began with "conflict," and compared/contrasted "External Conflict" vs. "Internal Conflict." Each student was then given a paper with the title of a book and a sentence describing the primary conflict. The stories ranged from picture books like "A Bad Case of Stripes" to chapter books like "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone." Students were responsible for evaluating whether their story's conflict was internal or external, and explaining their decision to the rest of the class. For their exit ticket, students returned to their interactive notebooks to connect back to their summer reading, finishing the sentence: "I believe Third Grade Angels has an ___________ conflict because _____________." Throughout the unit, students will continue to study and explore different elements of a story, utilizing their prior reading experiences to make the shift from "learning to read" to "reading to learn."