Sketchnoting and Read Alouds - Part 2

 You can read part 1 here.

After visiting all 18 homerooms for the sketchnoting mini lesson it was time to model read alouds for our staff.  Our building literacy coach worked with teachers to find the right book for each classroom. Some of the books were chosen by teacher suggestion and some where chosen by the literacy coach based on the standard(s) that the teacher was currently working on. Some of the teams, comprised of 3 teachers each, chose the same book to work on the same skill. The literacy coach worked hard to prep each book. When I showed up to help support her I saw that she had Post It notes on some of the pages. These were to remind her what probing questions to ask and when to remind the children to do a turn and talk. Turn and talk expectations were reviewed before starting. Each read aloud was done very intentionally. The lens given for each story matched the standard, of course. Here is what students were asked to include in their sketchnote: 

Kinder - beginning, middle & end of story

1st - character, setting, problem, & solution

2nd - lesson or moral

3rd - character traits

4th - show what happened in an historical text with text evidence

5th - how did a character respond to challenges in the story or how did the character feel about the challenges in the story

Before we started 3 teachers were practicing sketchnoting with their students. After my initial mini lesson an additional 10 teachers reported doing sketchnoting with their students at least one more time since I had been there. That's 3/4 of the staff! Some of the teachers even sketchnoted with us! #winning

We were again blown away by what the students were able to create. Students liked it and were generally successful. What I noticed while I was doing my mini lesson and the subsequent read aloud was that I could tell which teachers don't use the iPads with their students on a regular basis. At the very least these teachers are not using the iPads for creation, but only drill and kill apps that the district pays for, for our intervention programs. Hopefully, this project will get one or two of the laggards to change their tune. I can hope - can't I? 

If you want to see pictures check out my Twitter feed. https://twitter.com/rmbtowner_tech. 

Finally, our literacy coach is AMAZING! Her intentional modeling was spot on! 

 

Below is a screenshot of the planning doc for the read alouds.