Parents and Teachers! Creative reading and writing ideas needed!

[PRINCESS VIJA]

I am on a commitee who's goal is to improve our reading, writing, language arts in our schools. Tonights meeting consisted of brainstorming ideas to get community/parent involvement. Some ideas we had were.....
pen pals
summer journal club
summer reading plan


These are just a few ideas, what does your school do?

Thanks!

 

[Allie322]

This is a very simple one that our school does. The principal writes the first sentence of a story on a large chart tablet in the cafeteria. Then the kids get to take turns adding a sentence. They do this for each of the 3 lunches and at the end of the week, the principal reads the completed story.
We also have a school newspaper that is pretty fun.
Good luck and good for you for being involved!

 

[worm761]

i have no ideas other than to tell you to look at some educator websites. i homeschool and some of those sites have some excellent ideas. one site i love that has lots of teacher tested ideas is www.ilovethatteachingidea.com when i am searching for ideas i type the key words into google.com and see what comes up.

 

[FreshTressa]

I make my kids write to their grandparents. They actually really enjoy it, and so do the grandparents.

Also, could you guys to a newspaper that featured kids writings (poems, stories)?? They could submit things and the best ones would be printed in a quarterly take-home newspaper.

 

[FreshTressa]

Oh, and 2 teachers, one in second and one in 8th that did this, and it is what motivated me to read and taught me the 'love'.

We got rewards for how many pages we read and when we finished a book, we would sign up on this sign up sheet. Every day at a certain time, the teacher would call up the next student on the list to her desk and have them give her a brief oral summary. Then, our pages would go on a chart.

I loved this because I hated book reports and this way they knew we read the book, but there was no pressure. I must have read about 300 books each one of those years.

 

[Cindy B]

Our districts summer reading program is excellent.

They give a multidisciplianary studies book, and incorporate it.

For example, the kindergarten going into 1st book was pretty easy. Find books that you like, write a pictures and at least three sentences on it. For the kinders, that was a big deal, letter formation, punctuation, proportion with letters, etc...

The 2nd going into 3rd was wonderful.

There were many things: story maps, plot maps, friendly letters (letter writing format), biography, science.. (they had to pick one biography and two science books), chapter books (continuity) and other things

If you can get acess to some interesting color pictures, you have them do some inference skills. Inference skills are lacking in some students. And with inference skills, they are using thier imagination, creative writing, sentence structure, and problem solving.

 

[wovenwonder]

I KNOW you will like what our 4th graders do Vija. They map out a trip to WDW --- apx 1000 miles. For each page in a 'chapter book' that the 4th graders read during the year--- they go one mile closer to WDW. Once they all reach 1000 pages -- they are at their destination and they have a big Disney themed party for the class. It is alot of fun and something that they look forward to as they reach 4th grade. They do most of the reading in class so the teachers can be sure that ALL of the kids get to join in on the fun.

 

[PRINCESS VIJA]

Thanks for your ideas! Those are great.

Jody, when I become a teacher, I will definetely have Disney themed parties and ideas!

 

[luvmarypoppins]

Our school really leaves it up to the individual teacher. Our one ds teacher participates in the pizza hut reading program, free personal pan for meeting the goal the teacher assigns for the month etc. Another teacher had a space race, so many books and your rocket ship moved closer to the planet etc. I had a talk with one ds teacher and told her how ds hates to read etc. She dropped his goal amount because there is no way he can keep up with the others. Older ds had to read a book and make a newspaper with articles about it, like interview a person from that time, write about cartoons and fashions and entertainment of the time and sports etc. Alot involved there. Our cousins daughter had to have a mascot (stuffed animal). each week end the mascot went home with someone along with the class journal and you had to write where you and the mascot went and bring it back on mon. sounded cute. We also had everyone donate their used books at the end of the school year, then you could buy them cheaply to read over the summer. All money raised went to buy new library books. Perhaps a local restraunt, sports place (mini-golf etc.) could donate some prizes etc. for reading goals. Our little preschool had pajamma time and story time combined. Good luck, the possibilities are endless.