Learning about Settings

We've continued our study of Common Core Standard 2.RL.1 and have moved on to focusing on the where question - the setting.  For setting, I found some great picture books that have a very descriptive and easy to identify setting to start with.  I'm teaching mainly ELL students so I didn't want to confuse them with too many settings.  Even though the setting was semi-easy to identify I still wanted my kids to use text evidence to back up their setting choice.  To show text evidence, I used a brace map (thinking maps) and then also had students write a sentence response. 

The first story - Library Mouse we read whole group and discussed the setting and evidence together.

The second story - Gingerbread Cowboy - we read whole group, discussed, and completed a class brace map together.

The third story we used was Owl Moon.  To scaffold, we read the story and discussed whole group. Then, the students helped me fill out the brace map.  After filling out the brace map together, students copied the brace map and then had to fill in parts of the sentence on their own.

 



For the last story, for now, I used The Tickly Octopus. Now, I thought this would be a good one to see what kids could do independently on their own, but they struggled a bit.  I'm not sure if it was because of being ELL or just not having a lot of background knowledge, but kids had a hard time saying the setting was the ocean or the sea and they had difficulty coming up with evidence - fish, water, sand, octopus, coral, etc.  But, we move forward and will come back to setting again to re-teach as necessary. Below are a few samples of student work and the chart we filled out after they completed their student work.

 

Stay tuned for some plot ideas coming up in the next few days!