First Grade Book Talks

Do you have your kiddos partner reading yet?  We start off the first week of school learning how to read independently in our book nooks. We are learning how to care for books and to protect our reading time by staying focused on our stories, not walking around the room, and being very quiet.  The second week of school I introduce partner reading.  We learn to EEKK (Elbow to Elbow, Knee to Knee, Book in the Middle so we BOTH can see) read with our partners.  Along with partner reading we spend another couple of weeks really learning how to talk about books with our partners and the different things we can share with our partners.  The kiddos learn how to use stickies to track their thinking. After about the third day of this practice, I begin calling partners to my table to show me how they have been talking with each other.

This year I decided to record a few of their book talks. If you listen closely in the videos there are some good examples and some good non examples (where the partner is talking but not listening to what his partner is saying and others). I used these videos with them whole class to see if they could figure out what was going good and not so good in their book discussions.

By critiquing themselves and offering advice to each other it brought a whole new personal meaning to their learning.  I thought I would share these videos with you guys in case you wanted to use them also.  (Of course the personal meaning won't be there for your class but the examples/nonexamples will be there for them to find!)

Here are the links:
http://youtu.be/sjzFqdHVCBI
http://youtu.be/Ls2d-3OLxVw
http://youtu.be/XNdjE6rjWNY
http://youtu.be/G78mU4peMPI