Reading Website and Task Cards

I honestly cannot believe that our state testing starts on Monday. Where did the school year go? I try not to teach to the test, but some of our class activities go in that direction. Since this is my last week to try and teach the kids before the test, I decided to take a look at some of the data I have about them. One reading skill that came up as needing review was sequencing. So that is what I was going to teach this week. Sunday night I was working on my plans and feeling really tired and not very creative.

So, I went to a site that love to use ….

www.readworks.org.

Have you ever checked out this site? I love it for many different reasons. Here are my top 5.

#1 – It’s free! All you need to do is register and you have full access to the articles and lessons.

#2 – You can look up lessons by state standards and grade level.

#3 – The lesson plan format is “I Do, We Do, You Do.” I know so many of us use this format in our classrooms.

#4 – There are a lot of informational text articles and we all know that is big with the Common Core.

#5 – The lessons can easily be broken down into short sessions. This week I taught mini-lessons with my small groups and then they went to finish the work on their own. Later in the week we came together to review our work. It was a great assessment for me to see who still was having a hard time with sequencing.

There are more reasons to use this site, but I’ll let you discover them on your own.

Another thing I love, besides this website and my family, are task cards. I’m always trying to figure out how to use them in my room. This week we are working on area and perimeter of rectangles. In my mind, and I’m sure in the minds’ of my third graders, this is boring. Both are good skills to know, but don’t really relate to a third grader.

So…I decided to make some task cards for us to use.

I know my class prefers to be moving around, a lot! So these will work great for us. I’m going to post them around the room and then let the kids get going. Once everyone is finished, we will go over the problems together and I can use the results as an assessement. Or maybe I will have the kids go over the problems in small groups. We’ll see how the day is going.

Do you use task cards in your room?

Do you have any ideas for helping a third grader relate to area and perimeter?

I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Enjoy the rest of the week.