Reading Machines in Fourth Grade

Fourth graders in Mrs. Donnelly and Mrs. Jenkins' homerooms have been little reading machines this nine weeks. What really got the students excited about reading was our author study with Mrs. Hartnett in the Media Center. They studied books by Chris Van Allsburg, author and illustrator of some great fantasy fiction. Some students have read 8 books written by Van Allsburg. They created a class attribute chart, wrote brochure-style book reports and took lots of AR quizzes during the study. As a special treat they even watched, Zathura, a movie based on Chris Van Allsburg's book. Now...the reading machines will become writing machines as they begin to compare the books they have read in some expository writing essays! The benefits of our author study are developing the love of reading, having fun, improving reading and writing strategies, meeting the 25-book goal, and great results on DRA and Benchmark scores!!! The more you read, the more you succeed.