Gave it a Whirl Wednesday: Color Coding Text Evidence and Author's Reasoning RI 4.8

Hello friends! Happy Wednesday! I'm so excited to link up with Mrs. Rios Teaches today for Gave it a Whirl Wednesday.  

Like many of you, I spent a few hours gathering ideas to implement in my classroom from the Bright Ideas Blog Hop and today I wanted to highlight an idea that I used in my classroom TODAY. :) 

This bright idea that I used in my classroom comes from Corinna at Surfin' Through Second and you can access her original post on color coding text evidence {here}.

Using text based evidence when responding to questions about our reading is HUGE in fourth grade, so I'm always looking for ideas to make the process more engaging/meaningful for my students.  

Throughout the year, I've been using my friend Jenny's Text Detectives and I love them.  You can find them in her store {here}.

Certainly, we were already color coding our evidence with these passages and that practice was already very beneficial for a lot of my kiddos. 

I was feeling motivated by Corinna's post,  so today we stepped it up a notch. We underlined each question in the proper color before going back into the text to prove/find our answers. Then we wrote our responses down on notebook paper. 

This was certainly a little bit more work, but the extra steps in the process were so beneficial for my kiddos and made them a bit more aware of their thinking and the process of finding text based evidence.  My kiddos, even though they are bigger, still love using crayons and highlighters on anything; so they didn't mind the extra work! Many remarked that they were having fun and were a bit more motivated to focus on PQA, putting the question in the answer, responses. 

Not only did I try a new to me bright idea in my classroom today, I also taught a new standard!

I'm not sure about your kids, but mine are Olympic Crazy! I am too, so it's been a lot of fun using some Winter Olympic Units I've found on TpT during guided reading and in writing. 

I had a brilliant idea fifteen minutes before I picked my kids up from specials to write a passage about why Cincinnati would be a great host for the 2024 Summer Olympic Games and have my students work on RI 4.8 a bit.  Best decision of the day! They LOVED this lesson!

We identified the major point the point the author was trying to make in the text, that Cincinnati should be considered to host the 2024 Olympics, and then found reasons/evidence the author shared to support his major point. I modeled this on the Smartboard and my students labeled/color coded the major point of the passage and its evidence on their copy of the passage. 

Then I had my students fill out an accompanying graphic organizer I copied for the standard and well they rocked it out!

The graphic organizer is available in this pack on TpT. 

After my students filled out their graphic organizers, we did a mix, pair, share so they could share their completed organizers with each other. 

We concluded our lesson by sharing evidence they heard several times, such as: Cincinnati has two stadiums for the opening and closing ceremonies and has several colleges with dorms for athlete villages and events, and concluded those were the author's strongest evidence for proving his point. 

Today was a lot of fun in my classroom and again, I'm blown away by my kiddos.  They have grown SO much this year.  I'm certainly very proud of them!