lesson model follow-up

My Matilda was awesome! I love watching good teachers teach. You think you're doing a decent job and then all of the sudden your head explodes, like the first time you hear that there are other solar systems in the universe.

Some great ideas I got today:

• When teaching about something kids aren't familiar with (e.g., picnic), spend some time building their schema for the words they will see. For example, we put different food from the restaurant into the food basket and talked about what people do on a picnic. A.k.a., activate prior knowledge.
• Write the repeated words on sticky notes for students. Make up some sentences using the sticky notes before actually cracking open the book. Maybe even have students make up their own page in the story before reading so they are already analyzing the text before seeing it. 
• Similarly, have students find the words from the sticky notes in the book, establish that they don't need to sound them out, and then highlight them. 
• Use the pages in the back of RAZ books! At the end, my kids loved creating their own page in the story.

With all of this prep, when my kids actually went to read they were successful and I could tell that they felt their success. For kids like Sunshine, success is almost more important than anything else.