Cite Your Evidence!

Helllllooooo there everyone and happy Saturday!
I am so happy to be with you on this fall morning.

A few weeks ago, I posted a picture of something I was working on on my Facebook page.  The feedback was so immediate and positive that I knew it just had to be the next thing I offered for a dollar on this collaborative blog!

As you know, I moved to third grade this year.  I feel so lucky that the 2nd grade teachers did so much to ready our students for finding text evidence.  Being a second grade teacher last year myself, I can say that much time was spent teaching the kids to go back to the text to support their answers.  This year, however,  I need to get these kids used to the fact that they need to formally cite their evidence.  It's a requirement on our state exam and that exam is not as far off as it seems.

I have to be honest, I thought this would be difficult at first, but it truly has not been.  Here's how it went down in my room (modeling, guided practice, independent practice):

• I introduced these cute little posters to the kids during one of our comprehension work sessions. 
• I modeled how to use the sentence starters to cite evidence from the text we were reading together.
• The students worked in pairs to use a sentence starter to answer questions about the reading.
• I gave each table group some of the laminated posters to keep at their desks during independent work time. They used the sentence starters from the posters as they answered questions from the text.  
• Each day, I rotated the posters to new tables so that the children would be exposed to all of the sentence starters.

With only a week of practice, most of my students are using these sentence starters to cite evidence quite well.  They LOVE to use them in their spoken answers.  I think it may be because I told them that they sound like college students when they do that! :) (whatever works!)  At this point, their written responses still need practice and refinement. However, I feel confident that with continued practice (and reminders from these posters!) my students will be very prepared to cite their evidence come test time!

As always, I am happy to be sharing with you here at Teacher Deals and Dollar Steals!  Be sure to stop by my Teacher's Chair blog to see the latest happenings from my classroom!

Want to grab a copy of the Citing Evidence Posters for your classroom for only a dollar?  Click on the picture below!  

Have a great weekend everyone!