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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Conferring

One of the biggest draws of implementing a Reader's Workshop at any grade level is the time that can be dedicated to conferring with readers. I used to teach a 20 or 30 minute reading lesson every day with lots of teacher directed instruction, and every student would practice on the same class text. This presented immediate issues. First, not every student could read the text independently, so I had to scaffold and support A LOT. Secondly, it was time consuming and took up a large portion of our reading time. While I still sometimes do a 20 or 25 minute lesson when introducing a new mentor text or new concept, most of my teacher directed lessons are very short (5-10 minutes), and the rest is "practice" time where students practice what I modeled with a text of their choosing. This means that students have a lot more time to practice, and they are practicing on texts at their own level. This eliminates the reading level issue, since...

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 ...

Comparing Themes Across Books: Planning & Preparation

There are three main components to my Reading Workshop: Mini-Lesson / Practice & Conferring / Small Group (strategy groups or Literature Circles). So far I have talked a lot about conferring and Literature Circles, so I'm going to talk more about Mini-Lessons and how all of this comes together in a unit. To be honest, I don't think all of these components have really come together for me until the unit I am doing right now, which I'm generically calling "Comparing Themes Across Books." Planning the Unit What should students be able to do? Students have been practicing finding themes in short stories, poems, and literature circle novels throughout the year. Students have also been encouraged to think about and explore themes in their independent reading; however, most students need more work identifying themes in longer novels. Additionally, standards RL.5.9 and RL.6.9 expect students to be able to compare themes across novels. With this in mind, ...

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