Thinking and Talking Well Using High-Quality Picture Books (3–5)

Come read and think together on how to engage intermediate-grade learners with illustrated short stories (and meet lots of standards in the process!). This session will take you through a process for selecting texts, planning lessons, and teaching in ways that support students to transfer the learning from short texts into longer novels and chapter books.

Readers in these intermediate grades are still learning how to read. Using picture books, rather than novels, enables readers to hear a complete text in a short time frame. Once these books are read and discussed in read aloud, they become mentor texts for ongoing demonstrations of how books work and how they affect readers through their particular creative elements.

While Okapi materials are not strongly emphasized in this session, reading aloud and shared reading, as presented in this session, support students to read, think, and talk effectively in guided reading. This session allows for discussion of the entire reading block in these grades. (1.5 to 3 hours). 

Materials that may be emphasized:
WorldWise™, Perspectives (shown as options for texts in read aloud and shared reading)