Journey Toward an Authentic Middle Grade Reading Workshop

Hello! I am in my second year of teaching and am currently teaching in a 5/6 multiage classroom. This year I have had a lot of success with implementing a Writing Workshop but would like to see the same motivation and engagement from my students during our reading time. Thus, my main focus right now is shifting my reading block toward more of a workshop model. I look forward to this journey. I hope that through writing, I can connect with more teachers who have been successful. Hopefully this blog with also serve as inspiration for others who are also wanting to make this same shift.

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Literature Discussion & Assessment

Literature Discussion The best part of Literature Circles is the discussion! After students have read the selected pages and taken notes, they should be ready to discuss the book with their group. If I notice that a student is struggling with some part of the preparation, I will confer with him/her before the group meets. Early in the year, I explicitly teach how to have an academic discussion through modeling and guided practice. As a reminder during Literature Circle discussions, I have sentence stems behind the group meeting table. Accountable Talk Sentence Stems At the beginning of the discussion, I usually ask one student to give a summary of the selection. I rotate the student I ask and take a quick grade for summarizing. Student Thinking After that, it's up to my students to keep the discussion going for at least 5 minutes. If students bring lots of evidence of their thinking, this is usually no problem. Some groups ca...

Literature Circles

One of the first structures I implemented in my Reading Workshop was literature circles. My school requires small group reading instruction; however, teachers have the responsibility and flexibility to determine the structure of the small groups. When I began teaching, I almost always put students in leveled groups, and we practiced on an instructional level text. While this can be helpful for certain strategies and for certain students, I generally did not feel that it was authentic practice for my students. Choosing Books Now students in my class have choice in what they read during small group. At the beginning of a new round of literature circles, I have students fill out a Google Form of books they would be interested in reading. I usually have 8-10 books on the Form, and each student needs to select three. I then look at each student's selections and choose the one that I think is the best fit in terms of reading level, content, or group ...

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