Navigating Reading Wonders - Online

Hi Friends!

Wow, It sure has been awhile since I've last posted here. Life has me busy, busy, busy but I wouldn't trade it for the world! Hubby and I are expecting our first little one any day now. I'm both anxious and excited to meet our little guy! I'm officially 39 weeks and 1 day now...so he could literally make an appearance at any moment! Once he arrives, I'm sure there'll be crickets here again....but for today I would LOVE to share a little about Reading Wonders online components.

When my school first adopted this program back in  2014 I was completely OVERWHELMED. 

There is so much that this program has to offer.....but I had no idea where to begin or how to wrap my head around it all. During that first year, I pretty much relied on and utilized my TE because that is what I was used to....and let's face it, that was all about what I could handle.  The following school year I stepped out of the classroom into a curriculum coordinator position. During the 15-16 school year, I really had the opportunity to explore the online components of Wonders and found some great things I wish I had known about during my first year of using the program. Check them out below!

Not sure about you but I know that THIS sure has happened to me on a few one too many occasions. 

Ever felt super motivated at the end of the day to get a ton of work done when you go home? You pack your bags with all your work....not to mention those HEAVY Reading Wonders TEs.

Then this happens......

I have lugged that heavy TE to and from school almost every single day during that first year of implementation. My teacher bag was always bulging and extremely heavy! I sure wish I had known that I could just pull up the entire TE online!! If your school has given you access to the ConnectEd website, I'll show you how to find that resource. 

Next, I'd like to share the amazing Tier 2 Resources that Wonders has available. The resources are broken up into different books based off of The Big 5 (Phonemic Awareness, Phonics, Fluency, Vocabulary, and Comprehension). 

These resources are great for those kiddos who come to you behind grade level and have many pre-requisite skills they need to work on before being able to do grade level work. This is perfect to use in small groups and/or with those one or two students that you may pull individually. The best thing about these resources are that they are super easy to implement, all your resources are provided for you and each intervention lesson only takes about 15-20ish minutes.

That's it for today friends! I'm off to get a little Netflix time in. :) 

I sure hope that I was able to share at least one useful/new thing with you today! If you are new to the Reading Wonders Program, give it some time. I think it's a great program once you've found your groove with it. If you'd like to see how I organized my Wonders materials, you can check that out here. I also blogged about my weekly plans here.

If there are other topics you would like me to cover, leave a comment for me down below :)

Aloha!

Reading Wonders Weekly Teaching Plans

Hi, Friends!  Last year, I blogged about how I organized all of my Reading Wonders leveled readers and resources….Many people requested for me to share my weekly plans that I used to teach the series. Today, I am finally back to share that with you all! If you'd like to go back and check out that organization post, you can find that here.  When we first started using this program..I was just so overwhelmed by everything that needed to be done. The plans in the TE completely stressed me out because there was NO WAY I could do all of that in that amount of time. I'd like to think that I'm a pretty tech savvy kind of gal, but the online component also overwhelmed me. There was so much offered online, but I felt that things were just all over the place. To help myself out, I ended up creating resources for myself to use to teach each week. 

I created visual anchor charts so my students could refer back to the skills and strategies that are taught throughout the week. Also included in these packs are various worksheets to use throughout the week.

Creating these resources really helped me to know and understand what I was teaching each week. It forced me to read all the stories and understand the content I was teaching. I ended up creating a generic skeleton for my weekly plans. I mapped it out days 1-5 and listed all the things I would do each week. 

I also created my own comprehension checks based on questions I wanted my students answering about the text they read. There are comprehension questions for the Reading Writing Workshop story as well as the Literature Anthology story. Practicing writing constructed response answers truly help my students with their writing and to prepare them for question 21 on the weekly assessment. 

For planning purposes, it was really easy to stick to my schedule and pull out the resources I created.  I would stick my weekly plans in a sheet protector and use the same plans week to week. In my planner, I'd just write down specific page numbers or activities that I would be doing for that week. In the afternoons from 12:00-1:00 I teach writing and grammar. I use interactive notebook pages  when introducing new grammar skills. 

I hope this post was helpful to you. If you're new to the Wonders program, give it some time. It can definitely be very overwhelming at first, but it'll get better once you've established routines, procedures and become a little more familiar with it. 

Five for Friday

Happy Saturday, Friends!

I'm back again this week to link up with Doodlebugs Teaching for another:

This week we were finishing up our learning on Data Analysis. In 3rd grade, students are required to   create their own pictographs and bar graphs and be able to analyze their data as well. So..to practice this skill students were put into groups. With their partners they were required to generate a question they wanted to collect data on. For homework, they went home and conducted their surveys. The next day in school, they organized their data then created a bar graph and pictograph to represent the data collected. They then generated questions that other students would need to answer in regards to their graphs. 

Some of the graphs included these topics: Favorite fun thing to do, favorite pizza topping, favorite NFL team, favorite sport, favorite gaming system, favorite flower, favorite color, and favorite food.

Once all of the posters were done I went and hung/posted them all throughout our classroom. I announced to the students that we would be playing Musical Math Mania!! They were sooo excited but had no clue what the game even was! LOL. 

I played some music and they would boogie around the room. As soon as the music stopped they needed to quickly get to the nearest poster and start analyzing the data! They recorded the answers to the questions on their posters in their math notebooks. When the music started again, they would be able to boogie around the room again until the music stopped.

They LOVED this game and got a lot of really great practice in and didn't even realize it!

We started working on contractions this week. The students had so much fun working on this center, I decided to give it a facelift and add to my TPT store. 

I've also decided to put it on sale for only $2.00 for the rest of this weekend! 

 This week we also started learning about fractions.

 I did an introductory lesson to fractions using Whole Brain Teaching for my observation. I think it went pretty well. We spent some time discussing what fractions were, looked at examples, talked about fraction examples and non-examples then did a quick assessment on our learning using these task cards 

All 28 of my students demonstrated complete understanding after our introductory lesson! 

Whole Brain Teaching has truly transformed my teaching…. If you have never heard of WBT, definitely check it out!! There are even opportunities for FREE WBT conferences here!

Here is an awesome video of the fabulous Farrah Shipley teaching fractions to Kindergartners!! 

 

Once the kids got down fraction of a whole, we moved on to fraction of a set. We called up on some students to the front of the room and started identifying fractions. 1/4 of the students are girls, 3/4 of the students are boys, etc. I then had the kids draw themselves and had them add as much details as possible. They put themselves onto their poster boards then wrote fraction sentences about their groups! 

I hope you have a great weekend!

Reading Wonders Organization

This year my school began implementing the new Reading Wonders Curriculum. 

Since it is our first year with the program, we are being told that we must implement with fidelity. I was and still am overwhelmed with this series. There is just SO MUCH to teach in a weeks time and there are also SO MANY resources. Today I wanted to share with you how I organize my Wonders materials.

We were lucky enough to have the school purchase all of the leveled readers for guided reading groups. The only problem that came with this was finding storage. I pretty much had every single shelf space in my classroom already occupied.. I decided to store them in file folders based on week in my filing cabinet! 

I love that the books are put away in the filing cabinet but are still easily accessible. 

I have also been creating some supplemental materials to go along with each week of Wonders. 

In these units I have anchor charts, supplemental worksheets and task cards to go along with the focus skills for the week. 

After the week is done, I take the laminated anchor charts and the master copies of the weekly worksheets and keep them filed away in the folder with the weekly readers. This makes it easy for me to have everything in one place from  year to year. 

I look forward to next year when all of my copies and already laminated anchor charts in one place and ready to go for that week! It has been quite a bit of work becoming familiar with the program, creating weekly units, and printing/laminating all of the anchor charts in time to teach it…but it'll be well worth it in the upcoming years! 

If you're interested in seeing my weekly plans for Wonders, you can check that post out here.