Last week I had so much fun being a Mystery Reader to Ms. William‘s 3rd grade class. She told me that they were reviewing for an assessment and that the focus for the day would be Drawing Conclusions. I did a quick mini-lesson with the story, and we had so much fun!
First up… reading Hoop Genius {you can find that story on Amazon HERE}. And how precious is the stage in her class. Such a great set up for read alouds and student participation! Hoop Genius is about how the game of basketball was invented. It is a beautiful picture book and really interesting for students. They loved it!
After the read aloud I passed out cards. Each card had evidence from the text on it. Since this is a nonfiction book, we were working on drawing conclusions with a nonfiction text.
The textual evidence cards were in groups of three. So, those three students came up and we read their sentences as a class. The evidence all had something in common so that we could put it together and draw a conclusion based on what we read.
After reading the text evidence, we drew conclusions as a class. They did such an awesome job with this! We had 5 sets of text evidence to read, discuss, and draw conclusions with! It was so much fun to be with Ms. Williams class. I can’t wait to go back soon!
Here are some other really fun activities that we have to go along with Hoop Genius. Students make a Basketball friend and can write a summary of the story.
Anytime that we can incorporate a Reader’s Theatre, we jump at the opportunity! Students LOVE acting out the stories that they focus on all week long AND it’s great for building fluency!
Of course, we gotta get that Directed Drawing in! Here students draw themselves as a basketball player. Then, they review using quotation marks by writing as if the basketball player is speaking!
You can find all of the activities mentioned above in our 3rd Grade Rooted in Reading March unit. We thought people would enjoy using it for March Madness, but it’s great anytime of the year!
Hey, y’all! My name is Amy Lemons and I am passionate about providing students with both engaging and effective standards-based Math and ELA lessons.
Sample a day of Rooted in Reading with these lesson plans and activities for Reading Comprehension, Vocabulary, and Grammar!
One Response
Hello!! I am currently on my way to become an elementary teacher. I will be student teaching this coming fall. I love second and third grade so your blog caught my attention. This post about Hoop Genius is precious and very creative. I was once a college basketball player so this lesson really intrigued me. Not only would it be fun for the students to learn throughout the lesson but this lesson would be so much fun to teach! I will use these ideas for this piece of literature in my future classroom. I think it would be cool to tie technology in the lesson by having the students watch a video over Naismith! Thank you for your beautiful blog and posts. I really enjoy them!