1. Fairy Tale Unit Whitney Reynolds Background Template from: www.presentationmagazine.com

2. The Voyage For the past three years I have taught kindergarten at Washington Elementary School in Pana, IL. For the previous two years I taught kindergarten in Virden. I will be starting my sixth year this fall with 19 students.

3. The Obstacles I am interested in new ways I can incorporate literacy in the content areas. We have many new ideas we want to teach the students, but we are limited on time so when we can combine more than one content area in a lesson it is beneficial. It is difficult to include everything you need to cover in a day filled with Title, RTI, Waterford, PBIS, and many other obstacles. I feel like it is hard to put the necessary time into reading strategies that are so important to students.

4. The Quest Questions: How can I use fairy tales to engage and captivate my students’ interest in reading? Will using fairy tales help my students make connections from their world to the world of make-believe? Will the techniques used in this unit improve their comprehension skills?

5. What is Reading? Reading requires students to decode text by making sense of the letters, sounds, words, and sentences. They also have to then comprehend the text and make a connection to their personal background to internalize their learning. For some kindergartners this is very difficult because they are still learning the letters and sounds which delays their reading abilities. It is very important to provide them with the right amount of teacher scaffolding to support their learning. Through use of a voice recorder I hope to help over come some of these problems and promote literacy skills.

6. Reading and Writing Strategies Imagery Picture walks Journaling Sequencing Cause/ Effect Comparisons Visualizing Summarizing Synthesizing Making connections Prior Knowledge Inferring Evaluating Questioning

7. Fairy Tales Unit Overview In this unit we will study traditional fairy tales as well as new versions. We will learn about story elements- character, setting, and plot. The students will also compare and contrast different stories and versions of the fairy tales. This study will take place over a 2 week time period. With a culminating presentation at the end. This unit will address my questions because I will be able to use their prior knowledge of some fairy tales and link it to the new ideas of story elements. The students will be able to better comprehend the stories because of their previous knowledge and therefore I can teach them strategies to carry on to other texts.

8. Unit Objectives Give a simple definition of a fairy tale Identify the characteristics of a fairy tale using terms such as character, setting, and plot Sort fairy tales and become familiar with multiple versions Re-tell, in their own words, a favorite fairy tale Use illustrations to “tell” a familiar fairy tale Recognize commonalities and differences in fairy tales

9. Lesson Plans

10. Assessments Diagnostic Assessment involves pre-assessing the students to find out what they know and what they are interested in learning. Using this assessment a teacher can adjust his/her lessons to better fit her students’ needs. We will be using a chart to make a list of the fairy tales students already know and what they know about them. Formative Assessment is done throughout the unit to assess students’ learning. It gives feedback to the teacher and then she and her students are able to again make adjustments and enhance the learning experience. The activities done throughout the unit will be a part of my formative assessment. I will be making notes and filling out my checklist of the objectives when the individual students meet the goals. Summative Assessment can be used at the conclusion of the unit to assess the overall learning of the students and their understanding of the key concepts and objectives. The culminating activity will show the overall knowledge of the unit. The students will play Guess What’s Behind the Box as a whole group. They will show their knowledge of the unit by correctly answering the questions about the stories.

11. The Sidekicks Instructional Supplements (Click on Box game)

12. How can I use Fairy Tales to promote ISAT goals? http://www.isbe.state.il.us/assessment/pdfs/iaf_reading.pdf

14. The Happily Ever After Can I use fairy tales to engage and captivate my students’ interest in reading? Through this unit I have learned that I can cover many content areas as well as goals and standards by teaching fairy tales to students and they can be used to teach ISAT goals in the intermediate levels. I have also learned about new technology that I will hopefully be able to implement in my classroom. New questions: Can I use the same concepts and ideas to teach comprehension using other stories and topics?

15. Review of Literature According to McEwan, there are seven strategies that promote good reading skills. They involve incorporating prior knowledge, teaching the students to read between the lines, questioning and answering questions about the text, summarizing, and visualizing the text to better understand and to increase comprehension (2004). It is important to model these comprehension strategies for the students. Teachers and adults can think out loud while reading to show the students their process of reading (Keene & Zimmermann, 1997). Literature can be used as a writing prompt and motivate students to write. A writing prompt about fairy tales would help the students with journal writing by giving them a topic they are familiar with as well as a place to start (Morrow, 2005).

16. Review of Literature, con’t By using fairy tales, I can capitalize on the prior knowledge the students already know (Keene & Zimmermann, 1997). I can then build on those ideas to relate it the new concepts I am teaching. Keene and Zimmermann also state that “activating mental files before reading” can be an effective way to improve comprehension (1997). Students have a better understanding of a story if they can think about their experiences while reading or listening for a kindergartner (Keene & Zimmermann, 1997).

17. References Keene, E.O. & Zimmermann, S. (1997). Mosaic of thought. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. McEwan, E. (2004). 7 strategies of highly effective readers. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press. Morrow, L. M. (2005). Literacy development in the early years. Pearson Education.

19. Colour scheme Background Text & Lines Shadows Title Text FillsAccent Accent & Hyperlink Followed Hyperlink

20. Picture slide Bullet 1 Bullet 2

21. Example of a table Title Data Note: PowerPoint does not allow have nice default tables – but you can cut and paste this one

22. Sample Graph (3 colours)

23. Examples of default styles Text and lines are like this Hyperlinks like this Visited hyperlinks like this Table Text box With shadow Text box With shadow

24. Use of templates You are free to use these templates for your personal and business presentations. Do Use these templates for your presentations Display your presentation on a web site provided that it is not for the purpose of downloading the template. If you like these templates, we would always appreciate a link back to our website. Many thanks. Don’t  Resell or distribute these templates  Put these templates on a website for download. This includes uploading them onto file sharing networks like Slideshare, Myspace, Facebook, bit torrent etc  Pass off any of our created content as your own work You can find many more free templates on the Presentation Magazine website www.presentationmagazine.com www.presentationmagazine.com We have put a lot of work into developing all these templates and retain the copyright in them. They are not Open Source templates. You can use them freely providing that you do not redistribute or sell them.