Transition to the Common Core

Our district is slowly piloting the common core standard by standard. My first focus was this, Reading Standard for literature 5.1: 1. Quote accurately from a text when explaining what the text says explicitly and when drawing inferences from the text.


Something I have already created for my students as a tool to take notes is a playbook. The playbook consists of sentence frames, vocabulary notes, grammar notes, vocabulary/decoding/word work skills. It usually gives room for the students to write while we read our stories. 

What I have pictured to the right is a page from my playbook, that focuses on the comprehension strategy of questioning. The students I had worked in partner groups. After reading a page they were to write a question that could be answered from the story. Then, they would switch pages. They would then answer their partners question, but the catch was that they had to quote accurately the information from the story. 

The frame I gave them to start with was this: ________(answer the question)______, and I know this because on page _____ it says "____(where the answer is in the story)___." 

Now we are starting incorporate the quote into the answer to sound more sophisticated. It is tough at first, but once the students saw a few good examples they did a better answering questions. Now, they are truly getting it down, and we can quote accurately doing any comprehension strategy!

Also, my favorite part about this, is that I had students start doing this with a non-fiction science text automatically, which is the Reading Strategy Informational Text 5.1. And, these were EL students! It was cool to give them this power!