This time when I attempted to incorporate an informational text, I decided to use the suggestion of one of my colleagues and only read part of the book everyday. Before I began circle time activities, I looked over the text that I had selected which was about gravity. Gravity is a hard concept for young children to understand because it isn't something that is concrete. I chose to look at the first three pages of this book which basically had the children think about why they just didn't fall off of earth and why everything fell to the ground when pushed, pulled, tripped, or dropped. I stopped to question the kids as I read each sentence and when the book posed a question I stopped to have the kids think about it and discuss possible answers. The third page of the text that I selected ended with a question, so I told the kids that their homework for the night was to think about this question and what the answer might be. Once again, I had my teacher's aide mark tallies on the spreadsheet provided, of all the distracting behaviors that she noticed. The following are the results. Talking to neighbors was not noticed. Kicking feet was noticed 1 time. Playing with hands was noticed 2 different times. A non-related question was asked 1 time. Playing with clothes was noticed 2 different times. And other distracting behaviors was noticed 3 different times. As you can probably see from the original tallies marked, the number of distracting behaviors decreased with just a reduction of pages and discussing what was read as we read it.
For the remainder of the week I continued with reading only a few pages and discussion as we read with the same results with the exception of Thursday, but this was because we had a tornado drill in the middle of circle time, causing my students to lose their focus for the remainder our lesson.
Thanks for joining me,
Erin
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