What is reading workshop?
Reading workshop is an instruction model that focuses on the strengths and needs of each individual reader. Teachers model reading behaviors and provide direct instruction on reading strategically. Students are taught to select books at their reading level, they are then given time to read, an opportunity to choose their reading selections, and time to talk and write about books and strategies.
The following is a list of what readers must be able to do in order to comprehend text:
- Thoughtful Readers Monitor & Correct: They pay attention when the text stops making sense. They go back and clean up the confusion.
- Visualize: They create mental images supported by the five senses.
- Make Connections: They retrieve and activate prior knowledge in order to connect to their own life, other texts, and the world.
- Predict & Question: They generate predictions and questions before, during, and after reading.
- Analyze: They examine the parts of the text in order to understand the whole.
- Critique: They think about the information and evaluate the characters’ actions or facts presented.
- Determine Importance: They sift out relevant and useful information.
- Summarize: They take time after reading to think about what happened or what was learned.
- Infer: They draw conclusions and make predictions, and form interpretations.
- Synthesize: They continually change their thinking in response to a text
Components of Reading Workshop include:
- Mini lesson: The teacher teaches a whole class lesson on a reading strategy or skill based on the needs of the students. Picture and chapter books are read as the teacher thinks aloud and demonstrates the skill. Independent work time: Students are reading self-selected ‘just right books’ as they practice what they were just taught in the mini lesson. They are responding to what they read in a reader’s notebook. They may participate in book clubs to read and talk about books with a group of students.
- Conferring: The teacher confers with students about what they are reading. This can be done individually, as a strategy group or as a larger group. Key pieces of reading are discussed such as comprehension, grammar, vocabulary, and re-telling. part of reading instruction is teaching comprehension.
- Sharing time: Students share what they read and how they applied the day’s mini lesson. This may be done as a whole class or in small groups. Written responses and book recommendations are shared as well.
The units we will do this year are:
- Interpreting Characters – The Heart of the Story (Learning how to read intently and always have a movie in your head of what is going on in the story. Both fourth and fifth grade will follow the same reading outline, I will just expect deeper reading and understanding from the fifth graders. All students will read at their individual reading level and conference with me about their thinking and reading. This can be done 1:1,, in a table group, or in a specific teaching group. In Fourth and Fifth grade the focus of reading has changed from learning to read to reading to learn. This is why our reading curriculum focuses on helping students read to learn, and this takes different thinking than they have been used to in Kindergarten through third grade.
- Reading Units:
- Reading the Weather; Reading the World – Reading Non-fiction and a small research project
- Reading History and a research project
- Historical Fiction Book Clubs