Fantasy and Realism

Happy Friday, Friends!

Did you catch any leprechauns today? We didn't but the leprechaun did visit our room...chairs and desks were turned over, toilet paper was thrown about, gold coins were dispersed across the room, and the toilet water was green!

I want to share about the comprehension strategy we focused on this week- classifying fantasy and realism. To introduce the topic, I brought out my magic wand and asked the students if magic wands are make believe or real. Then we went into a discussion about fantasy and realism with an anchor chart I created :

I did a few read-alouds (Duck for President, Grace for President, My Teacher for President, Scaredy Squirrel) where we had discussions about the fantasy and realistic details in the story. We also played Fantasy Realism BINGO where I read a story detail and the students chose a fantasy or realism square to cover on their BINGO board. I created the following fantasy realism assessment for the students:

I always consult Bloom's Taxonomy when creating lessons and assessments for the students. I love that Bloom's Taxonomy has a combination of lower level and higher level thinking tasks. For this particular assessment the students: analysis (identify), application (illlustrate), and evaluation (justify). In the first section the students identify whether the story detail is fantasy or realism. I included story details from the stories we read as well as details from stories we did not read to make sure they could apply their understanding to other contexts. In the second section the students illustrate an example of realism or fantasy. They could illustrate one of the details above or from another story they had read. The last section (where "Teacher Check" is written) is where I asked each student how their illustration depicted fantasy or realism...this gave them the opportunity to prove that their illustrations correctly showed fantasy and realism. If their justification was reasonable, I made a check mark.

Hope you find this helpful for your classroom!

p.s. I read an informative article called The Six T's of Effective Elementary Literacy Instruction. The article was published in 2002 but I think the information presented is still relevant. Check it out!