Thinking Marks

Happy Friday!

We only have one week to go before vacation :) (We have PD days the Monday and Tuesday of Thanksgiving week-so it truly does feel like a vacay!)

One thing I wanted to focus on and learn more about this year is close reading. Now, I'm still at the very beginning of my journey (I have a workshop on it in December!), but one thing that I've seen a lot of is marking up the text on your first read.

I've been using Diane's Close Reading (she has some freebies that you can try out!) in my Guided Reading groups for the past few weeks, since it has been so crazy.

One of my favorite things about these products is not only the 4 different levels, but that it includes a think mark sheet to help the kids mark up the text. 

Combined with her awesome think mark sheet included in her products, and this pin and this pin, plus some of our own needs, we created a chart of think marks that would work for us.

This will be able to grow with us and we can add as we need-and we've already changed two of them!

Some of the kids found it hard to draw the thumbs up or down, so we modified it a little-although they can still draw it if they want to!

They'll also have a copy of this in their notebooks (they asked me to make on today!) for easy reference.

Now that we have the think marks, we need to use them!

Inspired a bit by Jivey's post, I modeled how to do/use the think marks using a Scholastic News (it's an old one, but we just opened it today :)

One thing I emphasized to the kids, is that they needed to start their think marks on their first read-while they are reading!

I showed them how to do this as I read the article aloud and had them follow along-making comments as I wrote my marks.

They were also told that they needed to have a think mark for each paragraph. Some paragraphs could be more difficult to find think marks for, but we talked it out how you could find one-by agreeing or disagreeing, finding something important, the main idea, etc.

After we think marked, I wanted them to expand on their think marks a little more-so I showed them how to talk about them!

I wrote this quickly, but I made sure to tell them that they should have the name of the article in their response-I had made a mistake by not doing one!

For their work today, they had to think mark the opposite page of the Scholastic News and write a response!

I had them put their responses in the second section of their reading notebooks (which are going so much better this year!)-which is were all our reader response go!

They did a nice job (from the ones I've seen so far-only about 1/4 of the class) for their first time!

Some of them even did an excellent job!

I love how this friend not only explained his think marks, but also added in his voice with some little side comments!

This is definitely something we'll practice again, and do again! I really enjoyed reading about what they think marked-it gave me a little peek into their process/brains! :)

Smiles and Sunshine,
Kaitlyn