The Go! Chart...

This one has been in the back of my mind for quite some time. We have played around with it while doing Movies as Lit and was encouraged with its potential but I put it on the back burner for continued research. Then a happy accident occurred. (I love when that happens)

While reading The Wind in the Willows, my 8 year old (without knowing) began sharing orally several elements from the Go! Chart. So I pulled out my copy and we started working through it as we continued our reading. I am still in the infancy stages of using it but already some wonderful observations have come to me.

The chart is broken down in to six sub-categories:

• Predictions
• Vocabulary
• Understandings
• Interpretations
• Connections
• Re-Telling

Since our book is a chapter book we work on it at the end of each chapter reading. We also began this a bit on the fly because so one thing I will take more time in is to engage in conversation about the author and the title of the book prior to reading.




The Go! Chart

 

Because my 8 year old is a pretty strong reader, I wanted him to start gaining more independence so one of his activities is to look for words he may not know the meaning to. We write them down in the vocabulary section and then we spend time looking them up in the dictionary. He enjoys "hunting" for them both in the book and the dictionary.

Another portion of the chart is Re-Telling. This is a basic narration exercise but because this chart is smaller I am working on him focusing on the "big ideas" of the chapter. Typically his narrations are extremely detailed (yes, he's a talker) so this has been good practice for him.

One of my personal favorite sections is Connections. I love making connections between things I am reading, learning, watching, etc. and then having the great conversation. This also happens to be the section that my 8 year old came to me about and started sharing. He read chapter one and wanted to share a connection he made with a personal experience of his and one of the characters.

We are still working through our story and the Go!Chart but so far we are enjoying digging a little deeper than just the basic reading and narration.

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