We’ve continued our study of Common Core Standard 2.RL.1 and have moved on to focusing on the where question – the setting. For setting, I found some great picture books that have a very descriptive and easy to identify setting to start with. I’m teaching mainly ELL students so I didn’t want to confuse them with too many settings. Even though the setting was semi-easy to identify I still wanted my kids to use text evidence to back up their setting choice. To show text evidence, I used a brace map (thinking maps) and then also had students write a sentence response.
The first story – Library Mouse we read whole group and discussed the setting and evidence together.
The second story – Gingerbread Cowboy – we read whole group, discussed, and completed a class brace map together.
For the last story, for now, I used The Tickly Octopus. Now, I thought this would be a good one to see what kids could do independently on their own, but they struggled a bit. I’m not sure if it was because of being ELL or just not having a lot of background knowledge, but kids had a hard time saying the setting was the ocean or the sea and they had difficulty coming up with evidence – fish, water, sand, octopus, coral, etc. But, we move forward and will come back to setting again to re-teach as necessary. Below are a few samples of student work and the chart we filled out after they completed their student work.