From the Other Group

I thought you might like to see how the other blog is handling the assignments. Here is one of their posts.

This post is based on the Think Aloud book -In my classroom, we have currently been discussing how important it is to gather information about characters as we are reading and to be able to infer information about the characters based on information that the author might or might not tell us in the book or passage. Students have also learned how to put themselves "in the character's shoes" and speak and write from the character's point of view. I decided to incorporate the skill of analyzing character traits with what students have learned about parts of a play and asked students to work in their small groups (reading groups based on reading levels - all reading various chapter books) to create a script for a "talk show" where the characters from the book they were currently reading in their groups were the special guests for the day. They were required to think about what kinds of questions the talk show host should ask the characters and based on what they had learned and inferred about the characters thus far, develop responses for the characters.

Because students are all working on different chapter books during this reading time, I first have a whole group time where I teach the strategy and model it using a book or passage that we will read all together. We have been using a chapter book for a read aloud, so I used a Think Aloud to create some questions, answers, and conversation for some of the characters in that book as if they were on a Talk Show before having the students begin creating their Talk Show. I showed students that if I wasn't sure of how a character would respond, I would go back to the book and/or my reading journal to see how he/she has responded to other situations.

I was able to determine the ZPD of the small groups of students for analyzing character traits as I rotated around the classroom based on the scripts that they were creating. Some students were able to deeply get into the world of the characters they were using in their scripts, so it was clear to me that analyzing character traits was well in their ZPD. Other students were only able to develop yes or no questions to ask the characters in their books, so I was able to model examples from their own books at this time in the small group settings, then set them free again to try to figure it out independently.

Vicky