Four-Star Reading Responses

When I was a 4th/5th grade reading teacher, I fell in love with the Say Something response assignment. Are you familiar with this reading response activity?  When students finish reading, they are given a Post-it note, and they get to choose whether they:

• ask a question.
• make a comment.
• make a prediction.
• clarify something.
• make a connection.

When our guided reading group time was almost over, it was so simple to hand students a Post-it note (that could serve as a bookmark), tell students to finish reading a chapter, and, as an assignment, "say something" on the Post-it note that they will share the following day when the group meets again.

When I first tried this response with students, I quickly figured out that giving them the above list was not enough. As a teacher, you definitely need to model what a well-written Say Something Post-it note looks like!  If you don't model, you will definitely see minimal effort in the form of notes that look like the 1-star notes below.

Recently I ran across this blog post by Chartchums, where they created an anchor chart that showed the progression from a 1-star Post-it note to a 4-star Post-it note for their second graders. I thought it was such a great idea that I was inspired to create a similar anchor chart for upper elementary students based on the Say Something Post-it Note reading strategy.

The Post-it note examples on this chart are based on the book The Name of this Book Is Secret (The Secret Series) by Pseudonymous Bosch. (This book would make an excellent mystery read-aloud, by the way!) (Amazon affiliate link follows.)

I especially like the visual element- it is clearly and immediately evident to students that shorter responses are worth only 1-star because they lack details. In order to write a 4-star Post-it note, students must strive for higher-level thinking that includes details and thorough explanations. When I share this anchor chart with students in the future, I plan to show them the anchor chart on the first day, and discuss what makes each Post-it note deserve that number of stars. On the second day, after students have written their own independent Post-it note responses, I will have each student bring his or her note to the anchor chart and line it up with where they believe their Post-it note should be placed. For example, if a student wrote a prediction, I would have him look at the 4 prediction Post-it notes on the anchor chart and decide which most resembles the type of response that he wrote. After a few days of doing this, hopefully students will be writing 3- and 4- star Post-it note responses!

I was going to make my own Say Something bookmarks to attach to this blog post, but after doing a quick search on TpT, I found that some fabulous bookmarks already exist! Check out these freebies by Let's Geaux Teach!

Do you have any tricks for getting students to write detailed responses to what they've read?  I'd love to hear your ideas!

63 comments 4th grade, 5th grade, Anchor Chart, Freebie, reading