Our literacy block takes up most of our morning. We start about
8:35 and go till 11am with snack and recess mixed in too. We start with word
work, have reader's workshop, snack and recess, then literacy stations. My
favorite part is definitely reader's workshop.
I have always used the workshop model, even when I taught three
year olds. It is so easy and beneficial to the students. Mini lessons we cover include basic reader's workshop set up, to
discussing inferring, prediction, and comparison about text. After the lesson the children take their bags
of books and poetry folders to a spot in the classroom. Their bag of books are
made up of leveled reader's and paper emergent reader's we have done as a
class. Their poetry folder holds all the songs and poems we have learned over
the year.
Each day a different color bag of books changes their leveled
books. I tell my children their level and teach them how to do this
independently. This gives me time to get the rest of the class settled before
pulling these students for one on one reading.
Children may sit where ever they would like and read with whom
ever they like, provided they make good choices. The children may read with
another child and we spend many lessons talking about what reading with a
partner looks like (eyes on book) and sounds like (talking about book, making
connections, sounding out words, and reading with pointing fingers).
After approx. 20 mins we clean up and have snack.
I do have a
literacy curriculum, we use Scott Foresman. I like the way they introduce
grammar components, but I hate that they are letter of the week. We typically do
this during our literacy mini lesson, but occasionally the book is super high
quality and works for a reader's workshop lesson.
