Predictions and Snowmen

Hi friends! Here are the rest of the pics I promised you yesterday. We have really been working on using text evidence to support our predictions and then changing them as we get new evidence. Here is a look at a couple DRTAs kids did while I read The Mitten. It was great because no one had read the story before! There job was to make a prediction, write the evidence (then I read a little and stopped a few pages later), write either confirmed evidence or the story outcome. Then they wrote their new prediction on the next row down, along with their evidence from the text...I love DRTAs!

The next day we filled out this mitten, which is an idea I stole from Cara over at The First Grade Parade (amazing). Mine is not nearly as cute or legible as hers, but my kids loved the giant mitten nonetheless. Today we actually came back to the lovely mitten to fill in blanks I wrote in the "events" section for the verbs Jan Bret used to tell how the animals got inside the mitten. They loved acting out "lumbered" and "wriggled" and "nosed" (and pretty much all of them). We will revisit this mitten next week when we talk about using the 5 finger retell during "read to someone." 

Last week, my kids practiced making and changing their predictions based on text evidence using 3-4 post-its during read to self with a self-selected book they had never read before. They turned out great!

Here is our latest how-to writing. I used this adorable craft I saw somewhere on pinterest and/or someone's blog to teach more about how-to writing. We really honed in on word choice and being exact with our directions. 

I tried to get some close-ups, but it still looks pretty hard to read....sorry about that!

That's all for now. Hope you all are having a great Monday. I'm off to the gym :)