Reading Workshop

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Home : 2004 : September : 23

Reading Workshop
By Sue

That is great that your students are so excited! I think that once you do a reading workshop, you will never go back.

I have some good websites for you:

www.cherylsigmon.com

This is the lady who wrote modifying 4 Blocks
for the Middle Grades. There are a lot of good tips in there -- but you may also want the book.
www.readinglady.com
Also good forms and records for management.

Also on www.abcteach.com (if this is not it do a search.) Cheryl Sigmon has some good articles and ideas.
I have the books, Modifying 4 Blocks for the Upper Grades -- Cheryl Sigmon
Guiding Readers and Writers,

Fontas and Pinnell

I love the F&P book. But, I started off with the Guided Reading groups and felt that my kids were stagnating in ability groups. I have multiage, and even though they are only supposed to be grouped byinstructional needs. It seems that those lower kids can really get stuck there. So I am dropping that type of grouping and letting my kids continue to do Literature Circles

Here is a great website for that:
www.LauraCandler.com

The best thing for you to do is to not try and do and entire model or program, especially since school has started. You are doing great, introducing things little by little. Also, don't just buy into one model. Be a careful consumer and do what works for you.

One thing that I have done that I LOVE is the reading response writing from F&P. Each day of the week, my groups turn in their reading folders to me with a letter about what they are reading. And these are full page letters! Then, I reply back. A full page letter. I love this. Just think how much correspondence a kid will have at the end of the year.

I am still going to do literature circles, reading minilessons, reading conferences. I am looking for a Writers Workshop, but I am sort of developing my own -- based upon pretty much my own love of writing. I give mini-lessons or full blown lessons, where I model the writing. We started off brainstorming - popcorning -- all the different types of writing that we could possibly think of that has been done. I incorporate my grammar lessons based upon what I see the students are needing from their writing.
I pull pages from workbooks, or make some on Edhelper to assess, but mostly I look for some specific things in their writing.

We have written stories. Now we are coming up on our Social Studies Fair. So I am switching the focus to nonfiction reporting.

Today students stripped my resource books looking for ideas for projects which they brainstormed into their writers notebooks (the hard, black speckled kind. In these notebooks, the students do prewriting, list neat words, list word patterns (noun, verbs, pronouns,). They prewrite.

I have also had a student copy his draft of a story onto the overhead. Then as a class, we thoughtfully praised the paper for things we have done, indenting paragraphs, using action verbs, not being redundant, etc.

Then the student shared his revised copy. All the rest were blown away by his revision.

My thing is that none of these lessons have I pulled from a book. This is just the way I have of doing stuff. So, if I am ever required to go to some scripted book, I think that I would die.

So that is where I am at. You will find that if you offer Scholastic books -- you can develop a good classroom library in about a year -- if your students order. I send it out regularly. I am able to get literature circle sets pretty much for free based upon the bonus points that I earn.

I hope this has helped.
Sue