Tuesday, October 6, 2015

Free Resources for Reading Comprehension and Interactive Notebooks



Bears, Goats, and Pigs... Oh My!!! 

That's a lot of critters to cover in a week, and that's not even half of them! We've been reading lots of fairy tales to get started learning about story elements, character traits, and themes. You Oughtta Know about these resources that are extremely useful in teaching comprehension strategies... and some of them are FREE!!! 

First of all... have you checked out readworks.org yet?  They have some great ideas and resources for teaching Character Traits. I used a couple of their lessons and then the passages with questions for practicing and assessing the skill. Did I mention these are FREE?!?! Go check out all of their units and reading passages!
These plans use some of my favorite books too! You can choose what's appropriate for your grade level and see the passages on the left? I am doing the first three during our unit and will review in November using the Native American passage, and review again in February with the African American Leaders passage... that's just about perfect! 


Our school has a subscription to Flocabulary but you can check out their "5 Things" song for FREE! My students love shouting out the 5 things, even though they aren't quite understanding the whole song. I love the way it blasts the words "plot, character, conflict, theme, setting" across the whole screen when the video plays! Hopefully my students will not say they've never seen these words... like they did at the beginning of the year (and I know full well that they have!). 

See, there it is!!! 

This is the anchor chart that I made quickly to help students remember the 5 things when they have to write a retell or summarize the story. 

My students have to be able to read these words and write appropriate responses to questions using these words when we do BOY, MOY, AND EOY mClass reading assessments in North Carolina. 

I have some resources available in my store that go along with story elements, character traits, and fairy tales.  


fairy tales

This is part of my fairy tale unit that has lots of materials for teaching character traits and story elements. This graphic organizer helps students generate 3 character traits for the characters in Goldilocks and the Three Bears. 

fairy tales

This character trait chart is found in both my fairy tale unit and my character traits interactive notebook. Students have glued this into their interactive notebooks for reference. 
fairy tales

Towards the end of the week, students are ready to provide evidence for the character traits that they gave the characters. Students wrote one character trait for each character and provided evidence by writing about when that character showed that trait. This is also found in my character traits reader's notebook

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