Hi All,
I'm
sure like many of you, we all search for a way to guide our young students to
be independent readers that can sustain their independent reading for as long
as possible. This year was my first year at really focusing my reading
instruction on my student's reading stamina. We of course still explored other
reading topics like fairy tales, folktales, and author studies. However, our
main focus was building our reading stamina, and our box of reading strategies.
First,
each student starts with their own book box. I got them from Really Good Stuff.
Each
child's name was labeled on the front and they were able to "book
shop" in our classroom library. Each day, 5 students would go shopping for
their books. Every child was aware of their shopping level from our reading
groups. I also chose to break up the students from a variety of levels so that
on each day, there weren't 3 kids trying to shop from the same bins. In the
beginning of the year, each student was able to get 10 books. My thought behind
this was that most of my students were at a lower level (between a D-F) and the
books weren't long enough to sustain them for a long duration. They only get to
shop once a week, so it was important that they have books that will keep their
interest. My the end of the year, they were allowed 7-8 books. I used
this chart to manage the book shopping schedule. It's editable and FREE! Click
on the image to get your free download!
Every
day, our structure was the same for our reading workshop. It would start off
with a 10 minute mini-lesson, then independent reading, which was followed by a
buddy share, and a closing.
During
our independent reading, we would not only be reading for stamina, but we would
often practice something that we had learned in the mini-lesson. For example:
if we were learning about problem and solution, the students would have to
identify the problem in their book and how their characters solved the problem.
Then, they would share this as a part of their buddy share.
To
track our reading stamina, we used Teaching with Style's stamina freebie. Click
on the picture to download it from her TPT store.
In
the previous year, our kindergarten did not use the full Reader's Workshop
model, so our students started independently reading for 4 minutes. By the end
of the year, every child was fully engaged in their independent reading for 40
minutes. This past year, our kindergarten used this model and left the year
reading for 12 minutes. Therefore, I'm very encouraged that we can probably
start around 7-8 minutes and feel successful. I would set a timer on the
whiteboard and before they would go off and read, I would prep them and we
would discuss what our time goal was for our independent reading time.
I
also created these job descriptions and would put these posters up on the board
as a reminder of what they should be doing during this time. It made for very
easy management so that I could continue working with my reading groups without
being disrupted.
After our buddy share came our closing. This was usually about 5 minutes long and allowed us to revisit the goal from our mini-lesson and to discuss how we did with meeting our independent reading goal.
I
hope you enjoyed our walk through of our reader's workshop and I would love to
hear your tips and tricks to running a smooth reading workshop.
