Reading Response #3

Summary:

• Chapter 1:
• Establish a framework that works for you and your schedule that is consistent, smooth in structure, and made clear to the students.
• Make sure you have a mini-lesson, a learning target, a reading time, a share time, and an individual conference time.
• Learn to gradually release the responsibility of the students learning while reading from yourself, to them. You do this through slowly weening the off of your modeling and moving to guided practice, to independent practice, to applying strategies on their own.
• Create an environment where the students feel like a single unit instead of a group of individuals, allows for environment full of accepted thinking. We need to make sure that we do not label ourselves as the only one worth sharing new discoveries with. Sharing with one of their peers is just as good, if not better than sharing with the teacher.
• When building relationships, you need to know what your boundaries will be and how you are going to deal with certain things that will come up in your class. The texts gives various scenarios and one way to handle each one, but in reality, a teacher needs to find ways to respond that are both comfortable and acceptable. And above all, we need to establish trust with our students quickly and effectively.

• Chapter 2:
• Develop a list of take-away messages you want your students to walk away with about reading and the workshop process.
• Develop both a weekly and monthly overall plan that guides the structure of your class and its reading routine.
• In the beginning, a student’s book selection should be based mostly on interest and less on the exact level of instruction they may be at. This will hopefully start out the year with the students being more willing to read because it is exciting instead of being afraid of reading workshop because they are constantly frustrated with their reading from the start.
• Reading aloud is one of the most important introductory activities for any reading strategy or even just to introduce reading in general.
• The beginning of the year is meant for developing routines and habits of your students by modeling your expectations and providing them with various opportunities to practice the steps in order to slowly make it second-nature.

• Chapter 3:

Overall, this chapter is about how a teacher can help facilitate their students book choices and mold them into more educationally sound choices while keeping them fun and interesting. We have to figure out how to make students want to find books that will further their education or have the skills to find educational elements in books that they love and do further research on.

• Book Selection: Make sure you have a wide variety of not only books and reading material, but also the ways in which the students read these materials. Whether this means alone, with a partner, as a class, or one-on-one with the teacher, mix it up, make it fun and interesting for the students.
• Content: When students are interested in the material and therefore have high motivation to finish it, they are more likely to complete and also come away with the important aspects of the reading.
• Schema for Themselves as Readers and Motivation: Making the students assume the responsibility themselves to further their research and their understanding of topics on their own will only be developed if it is slowly scaffolded by you, as a teacher.
• Purpose: Explaining to your students why you introduce them to certain readings will make them want to be more invested in their reading because they will understand why it is important. Also explaining to them why you read what you do will make them more eager to make their own selections and share them with their peers.
• Assessment: Making sure your students understand that they have control over their own learning will make them want to keep track of their own successes and share their discoveries. We need to make sure students “learn that smart is something that you get - that through hard work and effort, they can have the power to make themselves smarter and achieve their goals.”
• Work Activity Time: Make sure to use multimodal learning and a wide range of materials in order to stretch out your student’s learning to the highest possible level of understanding.

• Chapter 4:
• Thinking Aloud: Just like anything else, if you expect your students to think a certain way, you need to teach them. Teaching them how you think out loud allows them to see an example first hand.
• Proper Planning Prevents Poor Performance: Having a routine allows students to not only become comfortable in the school environment, but become more and more independent in their learning.
• Authenticity and Precise Language: Make sure your examples are genuine and not made-up just for the children’s sake. Make sure you use language that you expect your students to use and be consistent in the phrases and vocabulary that you use. They will repeat and reuse these phrases more than you realize.
• Active Reading: Make sure you develop your students into active readers so that they have the skills to read with meaning and make connections to their own lives as well as other things they have learned about or current events. Especially with the characters themselves, students can use these connections in order to feel like they are actually in the story, relate further, and determine what they have learned from reading what that character has been through.
• Making Connections: Take advantage of small-group work and let it develop into an opportunity for students to collaborate together and have student-led discussions. Allowing them to verbalize their ideas and personal connections with their peers is a great way for them to grow together as a class as well as individually.

Quotes:

• Chapter 1: “Once you’ve found what’s true for you, stand up for what you know is right.” - p. 7
• Chapter 2: “September is all about building relationships, establishing trust, creating working literate environments, and getting to know children as readers and learners…” - p. 17
• Chapter 3: “People who visit often say to me, ‘That’s so cute how they say ‘Yes, thank you.’  How did you get them to do that?’  Maybe it’s cute, but that’s not why I ask the children to respond that way.  It’s about tone, it’s about respect, and it’s part of the language we use as we live and learn together for six-and-a-half hours every day.” - p. 38
• Chapter 4: “Teaching how to make thoughtful book selections is hard work, but it’s not out of their reach, or ours.” - p. 40

Example:
Reading Workshop: What It Looks Like in My Classroom
http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/top_teaching/2009/10/reading-workshop?page=1

This link is to an article written by a teacher about her reading workshop.  This article has good information, pictures, resources, and a video.