Daily 5 Series: Read With A Teacher Resources

1. Read to Self
2. Read with Someone
3. Word Work
4. Listen to Reading
5. Read with a Teacher/Teacher Time

What resources do you use during Read with a Teacher/Teacher Time?

I love meeting with my groups during Read with a Teacher! I typically have 5-6 kids in a group and it's wonderful reading through a chapter book with them and experiencing the story through their eyes.

We just finished Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and even though I have read it hundreds of times, I still love reading it during Teacher Time because it never ceases to be exciting and wondrous for my third graders :)

I love using chapter books for this time, so because of that, my resources have to be flexible to adapt to the variety of books, genres, and levels we read throughout the course of the school year.

EdHelper's Literature Units
 

One great resources I have just discovered is EdHelper's Literature Units. Elizabeth from Fun in Room 4B first blogged about this and I immediately had to know more! It's a members-only option, but for only abour $20 a year, it's well worth it for me because they have questions, vocabulary, quizzes, and activity on HUNDREDS of books! The time it saves me is HUGE!

I organize them inside of a blue folder (blue=reading in my organizational system):

I do not use them with the kids as worksheets, I rather will use them for discussion questions, partnership activity focus questions and sometimes as a formative assessment along the way to check for comprehension.

We use Accelerated Reader for end-of-book comprehension quizzes, but I like how these units allow me to check in along the way to make sure their AR quiz will be as successful as possible.

Prompt Cards & Cubes

I love these {free!} Guided Reading Prompt Cards (thank you Shelley Gray!)

These cards have been super-helpful because they are so quick and easy. I sorted through them and don't use every one, but most of them are fitting. I just printed them and laminated them so they can stand up to lots of use. I keep them in a bucket and kids use them as a focus question as they read or an Exit Slip question before they leave group. They are very general, so it's a nice break and super easy to use, even for short stories or nonfiction articles.

I bought several different sets of these cubes from Really Good Stuff. I love these the most because they are a bit more complex than the card and one even focuses on vocabulary, prefixes/suffixes, and finding meaning through context clues- yay! Kids love to roll them and then focus on finding the answer to the cube as we read together.

As you can see, none of these are too complicated or heavy on the prep time. The choices serve the wide variety of abilities in my room as well as all of the books we read as a group. I really like how this has turned out and it's been fun to see kids grab a card and/or cube and have a specific goal to attain in our Read with a Teacher time. It has also made teaching a chapter book more enjoyable for me since the questions and vocab are all ready to go, so I am not having to tear my hair out the night before a new book thinking of them myself!

Do you use any of these resources or others during Teacher Time? I'd love to hear about it :)