Predictable Charts

Over the summer, I read a blog post from Jane Farrall about using Predictable Chart Writing: Group Writing for All. This was an idea that I had first heard about when I attended a workshop presented by Karen Erikson.  She created a handout that addresses how to use Predictable Charts with students with disabilities. The handout is called Predicatable Chart Writing, you can find it here:

http://www.med.unc.edu/ahs/clds/files/how-to-handouts/PredChartWriting.pdf

I realized that I needed to increase our writing in the classroom, so I have started to do predictable charts. We are using the book "Look Up!" from October's Elementary Unique Learning System.   We were working on the sight word 'see' so they had to use see in a sentence about what they saw in the book. 

Day 1 - Each student dictates a sentence to me from the book.  I write it on chart paper, and we will read all the sentences together and then try and find the item in the book. 

Day 2 - I have typed the sentences and printed them off.  Each student will then cut the sentence up, we will recreate the sentences, read them, and then repeat.  (you can see the cut up sentence in the second picture at the bottom of the page)

Day 3 - I photocopy extra copies of the book and the student then needs to find the picture that matches their sentence.  We then write out our sentences in a class book, paste the picture and add our cut up sentence to the page.  

 Our Title Page:

A page from our class book:

From Predictable Charts we moved on to creating personal books.  I found Carson Dellosa clipart that matched the vocabulary words from the book "Look Up!" so I created a book for each student so we could practice using sight words and vocabulary words to create books to take home.

This was the title page and students had to add their name as the author.

  This is an example of what each page looked like:

While doing this activity we started to use our "Word Book" to look up words to know how to spell the various vocabulary words.  I will write a post about the visual supports that my students are learning to rely on. 

Day and Night Sorting

This week we were working on Reading "Look Up!" and we talked about what you see during the day and at night. I created a sorting activity, were we had to find the word, add the correct sticker, and then sort it into the correct spot.  Here is what 2 of final products looked like:

These are posted in the hallway just outside my classroom, each child has a spot to display their artwork for the year.