Lifting the Level of your Reader's Thinking

When kids are stopping and jotting, the goal is to grow their thinking and thoughts as the story develops.  Sometimes that takes modeling and demonstrating how that actually "looks".

In this lesson I explained to these third grade students that they needed to support their thinking with evidence from the text when they stop and jot while reading.  I was actually teaching this lesson for a group of third grade teachers to see so I reviewed the lesson from the day before about "what" to stop and jot at the beginning of the video. 

Rubrics are key.  Not only demonstrating what meeting or exceeding the standard "looks" like but showing them how to do it and then leaving a visible model up for future reference.  They need to be able to hold their work up and see where it matches.

The kids seem to be doing very well with this!  Let me know what you think: