What's In Your Drawer?- Guided Reading for Group 1

Happy Sunday!  I've had a very accomplishing morning full of exercise, cleaning, and laundry.  I've got my phone bluetoothed into our surround sound and have been blasting Pandora all morning.  I'm not going to lie... mixed in with my shuffle of John Legend, David Guetta, and Justin Timberlake is a drop of New Kids on the Block!  Joey Joe has been giving me the energy to keep cleaning all morning ... but it's time for a bloggy break!

First up... the winner of my comprehension bookmark pack is...

#19- Meghan Barnes!  You didn't leave your e-mail address so can you please comment with it or e-mail me so I can send you your goodies?

In case you missed it, Meghan won this new set of CCSS aligned bookmarks chock full of reading comprehension goodness!

So... last week I shared what my group 3 (my on level group) was doing for guided reading.  If you missed that post, click HERE to check it out.

Today I'm going to share about my group 1- which is an approaching level group.

I teach language arts to two groups.  So each drawer has a folder and the folder is ready for my 1st group (their materials are in the left pocket) and my group (right pocket).

The red sticky notes have the names of the students in the groups so I can keep it all straight!

Usually my two groups are doing pretty similar things, but group 1 is the exception this year.

We are studying cause and effect in language arts right now so my morning kiddos are reading a passage about weather from Readworks.org.  If you don't know about Readworks.org, you must immediately go there.  {After you read and comment on this post, of course!}  It is FULL of amazing reading passages that you can select based on comprehension skill, lexile level, grade level, etc...  It's great!

So, my morning kiddos are reading and finding causes and effects in the passage.  They each get their own copy- which they love- and we highlight info and really dig into the text.

When we find cause and effects, we are writing them on sticky notes and adding them to the same chart paper my group 3 was using last week.  That's the beauty of the sticky notes.  I make one anchor chart and we all use it by switching out sticky notes!

Here's the anchor chart I showed you last week that we're still using... we just put on sticky notes, take them off at the end of our session, and then stick them back on to review at the start of our next lesson!

The kiddos in group 1 from my class are working on phonics sounds and basic decoding.  So, cause and effect is taking a backseat for a little while so we can work on those basic skills.

We are reading easy readers from a small group teaching pack I have from Lakeshore Learning.  The stories are longer but full of sight words and plots that are easy to understand.  We're still looking for cause and effect relationships, but on a much smaller scale as the goal with this group is fluency, accuracy, decoding, sight words... you name it, we're working on it!

We are also doing Making Words from Patricia Cunningham.  You can check out the book HERE.  I have a pocket chart that I put up.  I also have a huge collection of laminated index cards that have been cut in half.  The students get the laminated cards, write the letters with a dry erase marker, and follow my directions to build words using the Patricia Cunningham book.  As they build words, I am building them in my chart too and we are finding sounds, doing word families, etc...  I focus on whatever our spelling skill is for the week so they get lots of exposure to that pattern or sound.  The week our skill is sh/th/wh.

Each set of letters makes one mystery word too... can you figure out what it is?!  :)

So, that's what we're doing!  I'm hoping to get some info up later this week about my just above group (group 4) and my way above group (group 5).  That will just leave group 2 to go... those are my "almost there" kiddos!

Enjoy the rest of your Sunday!

PS- If you saw my letter to a spammer this weekend, I STILL got spammed after I turned on the word verification!  So then I disabled comments on that particular post and did NOT get spammed today!  So I'm going to turn off word verification and cross my fingers that Hemangi Goswami and rujul modit stay away!