Remember....

I love when I'm reminded of good strategies that I seem to have dropped along the way.  Mrs. Bower, one of our student teachers, has been bringing an old strategy back to life for me.  She has been working alongside Mrs. Maxwell with our advanced 3rd grade readers at Middleton Heights Elementary.  Mrs. Bower has utilized the mentor texts (click here and scroll down to the WWII books) we have used in the past to build background knowledge about WWII before reading the book Snow Treasure.  Her twist has been to use these books to teach the kids the steps in the Reciprocal Teaching strategy. 

With each new book Mrs. Bower is using anchor charts to help the kids develop their predicting, questioning, clarifying and summarizing skills. 



Mrs. Bower used The Greatest Skating Race to introduce predicting.



The Cats in Kratinski Square was used to discuss questioning.

The Little Ships was the text for clarifying.



 It's been great fun to see the kids build these skills as well as their background knowledge. She has done a great job choosing which mentor text best fits each piece of the strategy and implementing these lessons during the "I do" and "We do" phases of instruction.  I'm looking forward to watching this investment pay off as the kids put all the parts of Reciprocal Teaching together and apply them to their reading of Snow Treasure.

Let me know if you are interested in a refresher on Reciprocal Teaching.  Mrs. Bower, Mrs. Maxwell and I have some resources we could send your way.

Angie