This year I got a chance to work with a new reading program called Journeys. It is completely aligned to the Common Core and I am loving it! Of course, no program is perfect, so supplementing is always necessary. My school was able to purchase the complete set, so I got vocabulary cards that go with it and some sight word cards that the program focuses on for the week. I have never seen children so into vocabulary. They are actually using our weekly words in their writing and when they are talking with each other.
My kids are reacting amazingly well to the whole program! They love it! We are on the second unit and the whole thing is on informational text. I was so happy to see this because our last program threw informationl text randomly throughout the program so it was never something we could focus on for very long.
We began the unit study by discussing author’s purpose. I wanted to use an anchor chart for this so that we could keep refering to each time that we disucssed atuhor’s purpose; so I went to my number one teaching resources: Pinterest. I did a quick search for an anchor chart and ran into THIS ONE, but it didn’t have a link to the actual source 🙁 I hate it when that happens.
So I got to work and made one for my classroom.
We disucssed author’s purpose and we looked at different examples of books. All the students were able to correctly identify the reason why each book was written. This chart is referred to all the time:)
We narrowed down our study focus on informational text from there and we have been working in our interactive reading notebooks from Nicole Shelby. This is an incredible resource! One of my top purchases from TPT! We have been so busy I forgot to take pictures of my kids at work. I will have to correct that issue 🙂