Reading Notebooks, Compare and Contrast!

I can't believe it's been almost a month since I last shared anything here on my blog! It's flown by and I've been overwhelmingly busy. I have thought about and planned to share several times but things just kept coming up, so It's  been a while, but here I am finally with something to share!!

First of all I did a lot of searching this summer and decided that I really wanted to use Interactive Notebooks with my students this year, the plans for both math and reading notebooks have morphed over the past few weeks and didn't turn out as I expected at all, but they've been great! Here's a look at the awesome Notebooks that I've been using for reading, they are made by Michael Friemood and can be found in his TPT store A Home for Teaching Resources.

This product comes with a variety of reading graphic organizers that you can choose from and put them together to make this little reader's notebook. It was perfect. There were 12 chapters so I choose 12 pages, we were working on Character development and compare/contrast, there were several pages for each one. There are also several open ended question pages so I put a few of those in too.
 Each day we read a chapter from the book and filled in a page about the characters, at the end of chapter 3, 6, and 12 we also answered the open ended questions. I choose to make those compare contrast questions so one was comparing the character to  yourself, one was comparing the character to the character of another book, and the last one was to compare the book to another book.
My students loved working in the little books and I could see their thinking developing as we completed each page. Once we finished the book I decided to expand our compare and contrast into a project we could display. We created Venn diagrams in pairs comparing characters from two of the books that we read.

They used their diagram to write a five sentence paragraph that told how the characters were alike and how they were different. Then we used these Character Doodle-A-Face clip art from Krista Wallden of Creative Clips to draw the two characters.
 And here are the finished products hanging in the hall! I think they turned out great and I was so impressed with the work my students did!
I hope to be back soon with information about the Math notebooks we are using, I am loving them! I've also had a lot of fun teaching first graders this year! We do Success Block in our school and I am paired with different grade levels last year I worked with 2nd and this year it's 1st. We've been working on Nonsense words, I've got lots of great activities and some freebies to share!! Thanks for reading, see you soon!

2 comments

  1. These are fabulous ideas. Glad to see your back blogging! I like reading your posts.
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  2. Great work, I am a 1st grade teacher and would love to hear about the activities you are doing with them.

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