This week we kicked off one of my favorite units, Getting to Know Characters, which integrates reading comprehension skills with critical social emotional skills. Several of the learning activities in this unit are drawn from or inspired by Jennifer Serravallo's work in The Reading Strategies Book, including the creation of the above poster about gestures and facial expressions that indicate how someone is feeling.
To create the poster, I explained to the class that just like us, the characters in our books can feel many different ways. Then I showed the poster I'd made, which included the names of feelings in English and Spanish, but no pictures. I talked to them about each feeling, after which we made faces that showed how someone might look if they were feeling each of those ways. Of course, some of the words were new to all or most of the class--so I described a situation in which one might feel culpable/guilty and showed my best guilty face. I snapped photos of some of the best examples of each feeling. The next day we went back over the updated poster, noticing who was representing each feeling and what their face looked like. Then we began the work of using illustrations of characters' faces as evidence to support our claims about how the characters felt. Increasingly, I find that it works well to very gradually release the responsibility for writing about reading to first graders. So, the day before students completed the response tasks pictured below, we all analyzed a single character's feeling from a book that I read aloud, Marisol from the bilingual book Marisol McDonald No Combina / Marisol McDonald Doesn't Match. That helped them prepare for the pictured work, which they completed by choosing a page from one of their independent reading books in which a character seemed to be feeling a strong emotion, determining what that feeling was, and explaining exactly how they knew what the character was feeling. Over the next week we will notice what characters do and say, and use that as further evidence to support our claims about how they may be feeling.
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![]() Fluency--reading at a steady rate, with inflection that reflects the meaning of the text--is a major component of primary grade reading. First graders are very proud when they develop the ability to decode text at a quick rate. They need help, however, adding emphasis, pausing in appropriate spots, and indicating dialogue vs. narration. That's where robots come in!
*Several of the ideas for these lessons came from Jennifer Serravallo's extremely useful The Reading Strategies Book.
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AuthorI'm Ms. Howland. I teach first grade in Spanish and English in a transitional bilingual model. Click any photo to learn more!
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