Try Guiding Readers & Writers

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Try Guiding Readers & Writers
By Dawn

by Fountas and Pinnell. This is a huge book that took me all summer to read. But there are a few things you can extract and implement fairly quickly. One is the reading response journal. The students write you a weekly
letter in which they respond to their reading. You write back with a letter that probes for deeper understanding, or just affirms their thinking, whatever you think is necessary. You can teach a weekly lesson on a reading topic, like character, description, dialogue, conflict, etc., and have them find a connection to that to write to you about for the week. In this way you can guide

them in how to think while they read and respond to what they read.

I have just begun collecting these in my classroom. It's the first year they've done them; I'm using the rubric from the book to grade them. So far I like the process because it makes the students accountable for their independent reading. And I get a really good idea of where they are, reading-wise.