Setting up your Reader's Workshop

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.