Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes

For the last two weeks we have been doing a shared read of Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes. Shared reading is where every child has the same opportunity to read a grade level text, regardless of their reading level. This is because the teacher reads the text, but each child has a copy in front of them to follow along. Our focus while reading Sadako has been on writing responses to reading in our reading journals.  In our response journals we ask students to use a a T-Chart to think about:

• What are the ideas that are in my head
• What part of the text made me think this or supports my thinking (this is that quoting accurately part we are working on!)

Our T-Charts look like this:

We have learned two strategies for writing about our reading: character analysis and questioning. We are using an interactive notebook feature to help us organize our new learning about a variety of strategies. We use the notebook organizer to give us ideas about ways we can think about text, and to help guide our journal writing by providing us with a few sentence starters aligned to each strategy. Here are some notebook examples:

As a celebration of our completion of the book, we learned how to make paper cranes! Can we make it to 1,000???