Post-It Party - Stickies for Reading

I happened upon the Post-It Linky Party at Create - Teach - Share tonight. It's reassuring to know many others share my love of stickies. Whoever thought up those sticky-backed papers was a genius! (Must have been a teacher, don't you think?)  After reading all the posts (wow! what a lot of great ideas!), I decided to share a couple of ideas for using stickies in reading. 

For non-fiction we do FQRs (Facts, Questions, Response).  We use Scholastic News each week and my kids receive the news magazine along with three stickies.  On one sticky they write an F to mark a fact in the news magazine, one sticky is marked with a Q and they write a question they have, and the last sticky is marked with an R and they write a response to one of the articles they read. The stickies are put on the article in the Scholastic News so they can reference the article when they share. As they read, I ask them to use the F sticky to mark facts they are interested in (I like they can move the sticky around and change their mind) and then at the end they have to pick the fact that is most striking for them. The fact can be something new they learned, something they thought was interesting, or even something they already knew.  The questions they write are a great reflection of their depth of understanding and prior knowledge as are their responses. Sometimes I have them group up and share and other times we share as a whole group. I then have them transfer the stickies to a piece of notebook paper for me to look at. I use this strategy with a lot of other non-fiction as well. 

For fiction, I want the kids to get used to finding the problem and solution and be able to make connections with the story. I just ordered some stickies for this purpose from Vista Print that look like this:  

I'm going to use them at the beginning of the year. My kids sit in groups of 4.  I will hand out 4 stickies to each group and they will decide together who will find what as they read. There should be enough room on the sticky for them to write a quick sentence so I will be able to look them over to help with further instruction.

There are lots of great ideas for using stickies. Be sure to check them out at the Create - Teach - Share blog  (and give away) at http://mrsrojasteaches.blogspot.com/2011/07/its-post-it-party-and-giveaway.html  Enjoy!