Reading Workshop

(taken from Nancie & Anne Atwell/Scholastic's "The Reading Zone"  2016 - 2nd Edition)

How to Create Critical Readers: The 3 Keys

A child sitting in a quiet room with a good book isn’t a flashy or, more significantly, marketable teaching method. It just happens to be the only way anyone ever grew up to become a reader.

During Enrichment Reading, we'll make time for students to open books they love and engage in the single activity that consistently correlates with high levels of performance on standardized tests of reading ability—frequent, voluminous, self-selected reading. The ultimate goal:  students becoming skilled, passionate, habitual, critical readers.

And that is the goal of Reading Workshop.  Just as important, along the way I hope students will become smarter, happier, more just, and more compassionate people because of the diverse worlds they experience within those hundreds of thousands of lines of black print.

Here are a few more reasons why it’s so important to give children time, choice, and access, when it comes to books and reading.

Time

We know that students need time to read, at school and at home, every day. We understand that when particular children love their particular books, reading is more likely to happen during the time that’s set aside for it—that the only surefire way to induce a love of books is to invite students to choose their own. 

Choice

I believe in the power of student choice when reading. So in RW, I'll help children select enjoyable books, develop and refine literary criteria, and carve out identities for themselves as readers. It’s essential that every child be able to say, “These are my favorite authors, genres, books, and characters this year, and this is why.” Personal preference is the foundation for anyone who will make of reading a personal art. Opportunities to consider and reconsider books make reading feel sensible and attractive to children right from the start—and that they will read more books than ever dreamed possible and more challenging books than I ever dreamed of assigning.

Access

Students need access to a generous assortment of inviting titles. Our enrichment classroom and LRC are filled with hundreds of books that I am eager to share with my readers through Reading Workshop. During workshop we'll have book talks (teacher and student led), read daily as a community with our read alouds (see below), write reviews on our selections (panning or praising), and widen our horizons to what is available to us as readers.

Reading Notebooks - 4th / 5th

Each student will have a Reading Notebook to develop their reading comprehension as well as literary analysis skills. Graham & Herbert note the importance of writing in response to literature "...Writing about a text should enhance comprehension because it provides students with a tool for visibly and permanently recording, connecting, analyzing, personalizing, and manipulating key ideas in text" (2010 Harvard Educational Review).

Here are a few examples of the type of writing we'll be doing in our notebooks: