Anchor charts are an excellent way to introduce concepts, review and offer help to students. Here are a couple of ways I've been using anchor charts in reading class.
F is for Fiction
I like to use the chart above about once a week to continue spiraling important concepts we have learned that deal with fiction.
First off, I find a picture that I hope will engage the students and will allow them to tell a story. I then come up with sentences using 2 new vocabulary words and require students to use context clues to determine the meaning of the words. In the example above, I will be using "The lady felt
melancholy when she returned home and found her home had been burglarized" and "She felt
forlorn when she realized the thieves had taken all her possessions." Students will need to provide me with 3 predictions for what they think the words mean.
Then, we will move on to reviewing character traits as justify them with text evidence (in this case their "text' is the picture). Next, we review inferencing skills and story elements. I require that students use the sentence stem "The reader can conclude that.." so that they practice the language of state assessments. We then continue making inferences about events in our story as we fill out a story map. Lastly, we develop a summary (beginning, middle, end). Doing on a weekly basis this has truly helped my struggling readers and has helped them transition these important reading skills to text.
Now for Non-Fiction
My 4th and 5th graders are still struggling with text features so we start off with a picture and analyze it to write a caption that would describe the picture. In this case we could write something like "The flu virus affects over 2 million people each year"(just an example). Then once again I provide sentences so students can practice their context clues. Then, we think... If this picture was an article what would be some possible subheadings and text features. Students may suggest Flu symptoms and Preventing the flu as possible subheadings and for text features perhaps a chart or graph to show how many people are affected by the flu each year. The possibilities are endless and I've seen students get very creative! Next we discuss organizational pattern: how the author could take different paths such as describing the flu illness, comparing the flu to the common cold, showing the cause/effect of vaccinations, or maybe a sequence of how flu vaccines are made. I usually ask students to fill out each text structure and explain their thinking. Lastly, we work together to write a logical summary.
Our class will be working on these 2 charts this week to spiral concepts.
I'll be posting one anchor chart idea per week.
-TWHM
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