WW5: Wondering, Previewing and Comprehending

After my students are familiar with wonderopolis and understand all the different aspects of the website, we are now ready to begin focusing on different reading strategies. After doing some quick informal assessments, I knew we needed to start with comprehension strategies. Several of my students are choosing not to look back into the text to find the answers. They "think" they remember after reading the article/story.  We focused on Wonder #619 Who Came to the Boston Tea Party? which connects to our social studies unit. I printed off the article for each student, and we started with a conversation about reading digital text vs. paper text.  This was important because my students need to be familiar with reading text on line in addition, I need to teach them that you can go back onto the screen to locate text to find answers or evidence for questions. 

Our new strategy this year for comprehension is a modified one from last year which was RACE: restate, answer cite and explain.  This year we are using RRCe  (Reread, Restate, Cite - explain if needed). The students felt very grownup up as we discussed the new acronym and several felt like they understood it better.  As you can see from the above photo, their HW was to choose a wonder and practice previewing while answering the three questions that each wonder includes.  I was pleased with their progress however,  we still need to practice restating the question.  But the good news is another Wednesday will roll around, and we'll continue to build their nonfiction skills on Wonder Wednesday.

copy of notes the students glued into their wonder journal