Jack Tales by Amanda

My kids are having the best time with a unit that I am doing on Jack Tales. I started with Jack and the beanstalk since it is familiar to them. I told them that while we read, we would describe Jack's character. The list they came up with was: happy, silly, foolish, lucky, greedy, doesn't understand danger.

We focused on the foolish decisions that Jack made throughout the story: trading a cow for beans, climbing a beanstalk into the sky, following a path above the clouds not knowing where it might lead, approaching the giant woman and asking for food, persisting to ask for food after being told that he might be breakfast if he stayed, allowing himself to be put into an oven by the woman who had said that he might be breakfast, risking waking the giant by taking the gold, using up all of the gold on consumables instead of investing in a new cow that would continue to give them a source of money, going back and approaching the woman again after she knew that he had stolen from them, being greedy enough to go back up and endanger himself once more even though the egg was providing plenty of gold, not dropping the giant harp and running for his life when the giant woke. The first writing assignment was to choose one foolish decision and write, "If I were Jack, I would have........" This was great! They came up with some really good ideas.

Next we read Jack and the Silent Princess. We added Lazy to our list of character traits. That was on picture day, so we didn't write. For the 3rd story, I used an Appalachian Jack Tale (there are a ton of these... but not in our library. You can find them online and print them out. Because these stories are passed down through oral tradition, I explained to my students that there was no book. They would have to make the pictures in their minds. We read Jack and The Varmints. They LOVED this story. The writing assignment was to do a full color illustration of one part of the story. On the back of the paper, they wrote the words that would go along with that picture if the story were in a book.

On math days, We did "Jack Math." I made up several story problems related to Jack and the beanstalk. addition, subtraction, multiplying and dividing. For each problem the children tried to read it first, then I read it with them. They decided what we should draw or write to solve the problem. I wrote it on the board as they wrote it on their papers. I'm going to continue next week with more Appalachian Jack tales.

Star Strategies

In Guided Reading, we are working to be able to read on our own more without help. We have recently started talking about strategies that "star" readers use. We know that a strategy is "a plan to understand," or something that just helps us know how to do something. We also know that star readers are always thinking and always asking questions. We have 5 main strategies we are using to help us figure out words we don't know. Each student has a star that he/she uses to help remember our strategies while reading individually. This is what our stars look like:
The 5 strategies are on each of the 5 points of the star:
1: Look for chunks we already know.
2: Get your mouth ready. (Sound it out.)
3: Does it look like a word I know?
4: Try again! (Go back and try to sound the word out again.)
5: Look at the picture. (Sometimes you can figure out what the word is by looking at the picture.)

When a child has tried all 5 strategies and still can't figure out the word, then he/she can turn the star over to the back. On the back are pieces of reusable highlighter tape. The tape can be put on the word in the book for reference in our group, and the student continues reading. When we come back to our group, we go through and find words we couldn't figure out by looking for the highlighter tape in our books.

Using these stars is really helping the kids be more responsible for their own reading, instead of asking, "What is this word?" whenever they get stuck.

~Sarah