KBKilpatrick

Chapter 7:  Independent Reading, Confering, Responding, and Sharing

Our children need to practice everything that they have been taught.  Time to read is the best and only way to accomplish this.  Not only should they read, they should have discussions about what they have read.  In the reading workshops, the students, often gather together and have conversations about the books they are reading.  Not only is this time important to the students, it is also very beneficial to you as an educator.  It is time for you to talk to the children and discuss with them one on one about their reading.  It is opportunity for you to assess their reading needs.  Students can also respond in writing and share their experiences in reading.

Chapter 8:  Effective Assessment in the Reading Workshop

Assessment takes place while children are in the act of real reading.  An educator must use his or her eyes and ears at all times to gather information for assessment.  In many different situations, we should pick up on things like comprehension, engagement, level of accuracy, fluency, and a childs motivation.  A childs responses in a journal can give an idea of that students thinking processes and how well they can come up with responses.  These assessments should take place on a daily basis to examine and evaluate each students progress.  From these assessments a teacher can make decisions about instruction for a particular child.  Next step?  Start the whole thing over again.

Chapter 4 deals with how to phase in the reading workshops beginning in the month of September, and even goes into detailed schedules for different grade levels.  These schedules show what your reading workshop should look like at a particular point in the first month of school and how much time should be alotted for the activities.  This chapter also touches on twenty days of mini lessons and how those lessons should be structured.                                

Chapter 5 discusses mini lessons on reading strategies and skills.  Reading strategies ans skill instruction is very important in the lives of young readers.  This chapter gives a mini lesson outline for teachers to follow.  Eight reading strategy lesson plans were given these included:  looking ahead, fix-up strategies, making connections, questioning, visualizing, making inferences, making it your own, and looking back.  There were also examples of each of these given in the chapter.  Topics fro mini lessons were discussed to show the skills that a good reader should automatically use as they read.

Chapter 6 continued to deal with mini lessons but delt more with the elements of the literature and techniques that authors use to craft his or her work.  Topics for mini lessons on literary elements ( plot, characters, setting, and theme) were given for teachers to use in targeting elements for instruction in good literature.  Example mini lessons to isolate separate elements and identify them were given in the chapter.  Literary techniques are important in that they help students to recognize how authors create text, structure the story, and use words to create sensory images.   

I'm reading Revisiting the Reading Workshop, by Barbara Orehovec and Marybeth Alley.   The first chapter of this book really made a strong argument for reading workshops and how benefical they are for young readers.  It focused on the elements of the workshops and what each element should accomplish.  This chapter also compaired traditional practices for teaching reading and the reading workshop approach.  This was a eye opener for me as I thought back on my own experiences as a young reader.  Reading was a task and not something you did for enjoyment when I was taught in elementary school.  I personally can see the advantages to using the workshop approach.  

Chapter two touched on the ins-and-outs of organization of the reading workshop.  It discussed knowing your reasons and priorities for using a reading workshop.  It also went into detail about what a reading workshop classroom should look like and how it should operate. 

Chapter three began to deal with actually getting ready to implement the reading workshop and its structure.  It touched on planning things from mini-lessons to your expectations of what will happen in your reading workshops.