About a year and a half ago, I created a packet of Sight Word Sentence Trees for my beginning readers. They became instant favorites with my new 1st grade readers because it gave them confidence with their reading skills.
I love using these during fluency stations, in small groups, or for early finishers. We also use the Sentence Trees while partner reading. You can laminate the cards and place them on a metal ring to make them easy for students to use. I am always amazed at the confidence level of my beginning readers when they use these cards. By slowly building on the words and constantly repeating them, they are able to practice their fluency skills.
I now have four separate sets of Sentence Trees available.
Blends and Digraph Sentence Trees
You can find all of these by clicking on the links above.
The Five Step Fluency Process includes:
We read the article together and discussed the things we learned. Then, I had the students highlight anything new that they learned from the article. They loved going back into the text to look for new knowledge.
We reread the article and discussed the main idea and key details in the text. This particular article was perfect for this nonfiction skill. I had the students come up and place a Post-It note on each part.
This gave them a perfect visual of this comprehension skill.
I have to admit, I was a little worried about this at first. I explained over and over again that they needed to work together and plan out their charts. I tried to explain to my students that they did not want to just start cutting and gluing. They would have to come up with a plan as to where to place things before they glued everything down.
I eventually just let go of the control of wanting a “pretty” anchor chart and allowed them to plan and learn from their mistakes. I was SO pleasantly surprised!
Their end results were amazing. We only had one group that accidently threw away two of their text feature labels, so they left them off of the chart. One group out of 5…I call that success.
Scholastic believes that students learn when educational topics are meaningful to them. That’s why each Scholastic Classroom Magazine takes a specific subject like math or language arts and uses captivating photos, informative writing, and impressive online features to make it relevant and engaging to every student. Not only do students love Scholastic Magazines, teachers love using them in their classrooms because they provide invaluable instructional materials that meet current academic standards that prepare students for state tests.
I am a little bit obsessed with cute monsters…not scary ones. I even had a “monster themed” 1st 
We used this for the first time last week, and the students LOVED it! It allowed them to practice their reading and get up and moving. After doing a story together, the students tried their own. I gave each of them dice and a story from my 
Now, I will say, if you are adamant about a perfectly quiet classroom, this will not be your favorite activity. It’s noisy. The kids are reading and exercising. It’s what you would expect 🙂
One of the first things they told me was that our P.E. teacher would LOVE this!
In each packet, there are two options to choose from. The first set allows the students to move WHILE reading. (March in place while reading, raise up and down on your toes while reading, etc.) The second option allows the students to move AFTER reading. (Do 5 pushups, Do 10 jumping jacks, etc.) The second option is definitely your better option for those students that may still need to track their print with their finger.
