Partner Reading-Informative text

Partner reading is one of the favorite points in our first grade day!  It gives the students a chance to utilize academic vocabulary in the context of comprehension.  Each day I start with a mini-lesson and then the students try to practice it with the text that they are using.  I use both narrative and informative texts, and I group students strategically.  Here is a video of two students reading through an informative text.  First they do a picture walk where they comment about the text.  This is also a chance for students to learn active listening.  Each person gets to be an active speaker and then an active listener.  The active listener needs to revoice what the speaker just said.  They may also agree or disagree.   Then the students read the text and further discuss to see if the text matches what they had thought in the picture walk.  In this example, the first student discusses the pattern they see in the text and infers that the author will give information about the next animal on the page.  I develop the mini lessons using the common core standards for reading literature and speaking and listening.  I do the mini lesson in a fishbowl setting with another student modeling along with me.  This lets all the kids see what I expect out of the partner reading/talk time.  I also walk around during the time so that I can video tape partners that are using great language or that are being great models.  When we debrief we quickly watch these superstars.  The mini lesson on this day was to practice being an active listener.  I trained the kids with accountable talk frames available at my TPT store: http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Accountable-Talk-Language-Frames-Student-Cards-1104438  I first had the kids hold the cards, but now they just refer to them if they need to on a poster that is located in our room.  I have a lot of English language learners in my class so providing the frames initially helped them gain confidence and experience in academic conversations.  I love the way in this video the little guy makes sure that the active listener gets it right.  These kids are AWESOME!