Getting Kids to Talk About the Text!

Getting students to have meaningful discussions about text is hard, especially in first grade. My teammate shared an awesome idea with me that she calls 3-2-1 Notes. It's used with non-fiction. I love it, because it's the perfect way to slowly integrate non-fiction into the classroom and encourage discussion about the text. We started with a scholastic news article. It's short and sweet which is perfect for this age because... we all know we can't keep their attention for long!

The 3-2-1 Notes are something I want to continue all year long, so I laminated my anchor chart after I made it. To first use the chart, we watched a video and read our article about Squanto.

As we read the article, we also touched on the text features that we saw inside.

After reading, we identified the topic.

Then, we shared things we learned with our buddy on the rug. I had three students share.

This was actually tough - we had to talk about how what we learned had to be from what we just read or watched. Some kiddos wanted to add in a few 'extras.' ;-)

We talked about questions we had. We noticed that we actually asked a lot of questions WHILE we were reading. We jotted two of those down.

Then, we discussed how drawing pictures can show that we understood what we read. The students told me a few things I should draw. I asked them to tell me WHY they drew these things. We worked on responding correctly here.

Tomorrow, student's will be reading a Time for Kids with a buddy. They'll get their own 3-2-1 Notes paper to fill out as/after they read. I'm excited to see how it goes! 

I'll be back to share how it went with a link to the post and printable! :-)

Have a happy Monday!