Predictable Charts

Predictable charts are a great way to practice print awareness, directionality, one-to-one correspondence, letter recognition and formation, sounds, letters vs. words, sight words, and  punctuation. Ideally, we do one predictable chart cycle per week, though it may hold over to two weeks if it is a particularly busy time. They have "predictable" information because everyone's sentence begins the same. For example, "In Fall, we see _____."

 We spend a couple of days recording student responses on the chart and discussing attributes of the resulting text, a couple of days playing with the "cut-up sentences" (see photos), and end the week with a class book that features the information from the chart, plus illustrations. This year, I am thinking of doing class big books by having the children glue down their cutup sentence strips on large paper and add illustrations instead of the smaller class books.

Below is an example page from a "What I Would Cook" chart and a cut-up sentence from that chart. I write the sentence stem in one color, the child's response in another color, and then put the child's name in a third color in parentheses. In the chart below, capital letters were found and underlined, we noted that several of the responses on the page began with the /p/ sound, and I drew attention to the "s" saying the /z/ sound in two words.

I prepare the sentences on strips, cut them apart, and put them in a baggie with each child's name. (I reuse the baggies each time because students either take their sentences home paper-clipped, or they will be glued down in a class big book. I do a whole-group activity with several of the cutup sentences. I pick a student to hold each word strip from the sentence (one child is the author of the sentence). I am careful to call them up to hold the words out of order. Then we talk our way through how to make the sentence right (looking for capital letters, looking for the word with a period at the end, etc.).

We read through each attempt, with the children usually giggling when it doesn't make sense. We make a game of it. After we have finished working several cutup sentences as a group, I give out the rest of the baggies and give the children a few minutes to put their sentences in order and read them. Next, they are either returned to me to use in the big book later in the week or paper-clipped and sent home.

Book covers: Below are some of the class book covers that I've made for some of the predictable charts that we do.