Main Idea and Details

This past week my students identified the main idea and details in a nonfiction text. On Monday, I began the lesson by stating the objective and sharing with students a chapter from the nonfiction selection Extreme Weather from our Treasure Series. We discussed the chapter and I did some think-alouds to model for students how to find the main idea and at least two supporting details. Then students collaborated with a buddy by reading a chapter of their leveled reader, which was either on Hurricanes or Tornadoes. They noted the main idea and supporting details creating a circle map in their notebooks, and then took their notes and typed them into sentences into blog post using Kidblog. I modeled a chapter each day from the book Extreme Weather, and students worked on one chapter a day in their book with their buddy. Finally, to culminate the week's lesson students collaborated again with their weekly buddy to create a 4 slide presentation using keynote on the iPads. Students were highly engaged motivated and the lesson was student driven.
Here is my PLEP student from Holy Cross College working with a pair of students and a picture of a few othersstudents hard at work on their blog post.

Mrs. Difulco, the Special Education teacher here working with a group of students.

Here you can barely see but the anchor chart, which is on the easel holds the "I can" statement for students. You can also see on the board the two sentence starters I gave students to guide them with their blog posts.

Another day of students hard at work!

Here's a shot of the anchor chart a little closer.Take a look at our Interval Scores in the background, you can see the student's growth. We are getting closer to our goal of 80% as a class!

Here is an example of one of the slideshows created.

Presentation 2

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