Every year we have high hopes… that every student will come in reading on grade level and we can just dive right in. Unfortunately, at our school this doesn’t happen. Let us give you a little background. Our school is K – 5 and has around 820 kids. We have about 87% of our kiddos on free and reduced lunch, an average of 63% of our students are ELL and we have about 50% turnover rate each year. Sooo… each of our classrooms has students reading at a wide range of levels. Talk about overwhelming! We don’t know about you, but for us it is really hard to find text all on the same topic that ALL our students can read and interact with. So we have been racking our brains and working hard to come up with something that we can use.
Here is what we came up with! We are so excited to share it with all of you!
This is our fall themed reading passages bundle. This has SIX different passage sets. Each set has FOUR different text leveled passages! Seriously people! LIFE SAVER! Click HERE to see this set in our store. Below we put some pictures of our Back To School Passages. We have broken up the fall bundle into individual passages sets. These are: Bats!, Pumpkin Pie!, Spiders!, How Do Apples Grow?, Back to School and It’s Fall! You can get the whole bundle or you can get the themes that best work for your classroom. Just click on the titles to find them in our store.
Each passages has the same content, it’s the difficulty that increases. The lowest passage is level C and the highest is H/I. AMAZING!!!!! All our kiddos can think about and discuss the same topic and pull out the same information. Let me tell you, for our below level kiddos this is AWESOME! Not only are there passages but there are also activities that can be done to support the content in the passages.
These are vocabulary cards where students can match the word to the definition.
This is a mini card game. Students not only practice the vocabulary words in the passages but also the sight words. WATCH OUT for the broken pencil card! You will lose a turn:(
Each passage can use the text dependent questions page! EACH PASSAGE! That means you don’t have to find/create different response pages for the students! You can use this with kindergarteners all the way to 2nd grade! Talk about close reading! WHHAAAAT?!?!? Awesome!
There is also a vocabulary dictionary, practice page and exit slip to see how well the students learned the vocabulary words.
We are beyond excited to use this with our kids this year. We did a test run with some ocean passages last year and the kids L.O.V.E.D. it! Anytime that we can create something that saves time and helps students, we are all about it! We have used this both in whole group and small group. Depending on the needs of our kiddos or our purpose.
If you want to check out or try out one of these passages, download our FREEBIE! It’s called Apples, Apples, Apples. If you download, please let us know what you think about it or how you plan to use it. We hope that this is as helpful to all of you as it is to us!
Now, back to working on our classroom set ups….
2 Comments
Unknown Author
September 24, 2014 / 4:35 am
I love these! Will you be creating a bundle for each season?
2 Literacy Teachers Author
September 24, 2014 / 5:02 am
Thank you!! Yes we will. We are finishing up another fall bundle which we hope to have posted by this weekend. We plan to do passages for each season as well as other topics such as oceans. Stay tuned:)
Author
I love these! Will you be creating a bundle for each season?
Author
Thank you!! Yes we will. We are finishing up another fall bundle which we hope to have posted by this weekend. We plan to do passages for each season as well as other topics such as oceans. Stay tuned:)