One of my favorite units to teach is my historical fiction unit. I love it for SO many reasons! Historical fiction is a new genre for many elementary students, so they get super excited! There are SO many great comprehension strategies to teach as you read. Fortunately, there are TONS of amazing books to share with students--from picture books to chapter books. I love being able to ... Read the Post
Writing Historical Fiction Diaries
Why historical fiction? One of my favorite units is historical fiction--and it quickly becomes a favorite of my students--as we read historical fiction and write historical fiction diaries. As students move through elementary school, we give them a TON of opportunities to read realistic fiction. As they get older, adding historical fiction to their repertoire is a perfect way to kick things ... Read the Post
Using Partner Response Journals
Hey there! Just wanted to share a little information about a fun and practical lesson I did this past week with one of my favorite texts! I love using picture books to do "double duty"--to teach reading strategies and skills AND social studies or science content. For this lesson, I talk to my students about how writing is communicating--so we use our reading journals to practice our ... Read the Post
Pioneer Life: Part 2 and maybe even part 3!
The other day I blogged about how I have been trying to incorporate more "informal research" into my instruction...and how we dug into our pioneer research. Miss it? Just CLICK HERE to find it! So...the entire reason for our research (besides learning about some of our country's history!) was to help students understand that reading historical fiction WELL requires a certain ... Read the Post
Getting Ready for Sarah, Plain and Tall Discussion Groups
We are coming to the end our our feature article unit and I am digging in to all my historical fiction resources, articles, picture books, novels, and the like to get myself ready for this integrated reading and writing unit. I LOVE historical fiction, and this is a perfect time of year to really start to make some connections with the history concepts we have been learning in social ... Read the Post
Digging Deeper into Texts
If you have followed me for the last year, this post may look a little familiar. It's come around to our "writing about historical fiction" unit, and once again my students are LOVING IT! I would go so far as to say that today's writing block was one of our best hours of the year so far this year! In a nutshell, this writing unit asks students to think back and reflect on a book/books ... Read the Post