Monday, March 14, 2011

The CAFE Book Chapter 6: Whole-Class Instructuion

My goal for today's blog is to make is short and sweet.  After I looked back over my previous 5 chapters' blogs, it became clear to me that I was writing a Cliff Notes for the chapter and not really a blog.  So hear we go...
  • I love the idea of mini-lessons, but my gut also tells me that this can be dangerous with an inexperienced and/or ineffective teacher.  How do they know what mini-lessons to teach?
  • What if we followed Renee's suggestion and worked as a school on 4 strategies to do consistently across PK-5?
    • Check for understanding
    • Back Up and Reread
    • Tune In to Interesting Words
    • Cross Checking
  • I like the bulletin board on p.93 that shows the strategies in a visual way by comprehension, accuracy, fluency, and expanding vocabulary.
  • The whole-class lesson elements that really stuck with me are:
    • Secret to success cannot be a secret!
    • Let students write the strategy cards for buy-in.
    • Review, review, review...
    • Recognize the student who helped with the strategy is another "teacher in the room".
  • I love the shoe lesson.  It is a yearlong anchor that should be referenced continuously to encourage successful reading and reading choices.
  • Have any of you played the Inferring Game?  How did it go?
  • I like the visual chart of summarizing text and sequencing main events.  I would think it would have to cut back on unneeded details that children share??
  • Do any of you use the "Class Word Collector"?  It sounds fairly simple, but I am not sure if the vocabulary would stick??

2 comments:

  1. I like the idea of posting the strategies that you teach on the CAFE wall. That is something that I did not do this year and I think that would be a benifit to my students as well as for me. I just need to find the wall space. (maybe closet doors if I could get things to stick.) I did the good fit lesson at the beginning of the year and the students "got it". However I find that they need practice at picking out books especially when they go the the library. With updating the library, I think that it would be nice to organize books according to level. This way students could easily find a good fit book. I agree that the inferring game looked great. Would like to try after spring break. I also want to try the expanded vocabulary chart and little notebooks. We do clarifying in the room all the time, but don't share in the way that CAFE suggests.

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  2. Mary, maybe you could suggest that to Tifini for the picture books at least?

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