I’m sure many of you spent last Friday participating in Read Across America with Accelerated Reading. My fellow fifth grade teacher and I wanted to find a way to create a few incentives and activities that would make students motivated to read while still responding to text. In lower grades, it is often easy to encourage students to read X number of books or track how many AR tests they can take (and pass) on that particular day. In upper grades, we are reading chapter books and it might take the entire day to make it through a good portion of the book. We wanted to create a couple of ways to keep them interested and looking for particular things!
We decided to grab a few brown paper bags and have students look for various figurative language pieces as they read. If they discovered an example in their text, they would grab one of the slips of paper, write the example of the text, and drop it in the correct bag. My kids were excited about this and really worked to find examples of figurative language throughout the day.
We also gave our students a blank TicTacToe board before the bell rang in the morning. We instructed them to use the words from the back (see picture below) to complete their TicTacToe board in any order that they would like.
At the end of the day, we gave the kids a few minutes to write a sentence describing each of the story elements from the book(s) that they had been working on throughout the day. When time was up, we drew these nine words out of a bag (kinda like a mix of Bingo and TicTacToe). As I called the story element, if they had a complete sentence written about their book, they could cross it off. If they had three in a row, they won! 🙂
Our kids really seemed to enjoy the day lounging around in their PJs just reading! Sounds like a perfect day in my book too!!! 🙂
If you would like the printables that we used, click {here}!