Schoolwide Reader's Workshop

Unit 1 Launching Reader's Workshop

The beginning of the school year is an exciting time! Students enter their classrooms with a heightened sense of curiosity and wonder. First impressions go a long way for young learners, and it is important for them to experience a comfortable and engaging invitation into their literacy-rich environment. Brightly decorated bulletin boards, shiny desks and tables, and beautifully organized books await your students. The start of each new school year provides opportunities for you and your students to create a community of learners who respect, listen to, share, and respond to the thoughts and ideas of others. This is especially important when considering your community of readers.

Unit 2 Fiction

Readers of all ages are drawn to fiction, and it may very well be the genre students are most likely to choose as they search through a library or bookstore. Fiction stories are typically the stories your students will be most familiar with. These are the stories they remember hearing when they were younger—the stories told and retold from generation to generation, from one culture to another. Each story takes you on a journey, an adventure, and an experience with memorable characters and events. The world is full of stories, and through stories we learn about ourselves and others.

Unit 3 Nonfiction

Nonfiction is a rich, engaging genre offering a variety of topics that will entice any reader! Students will spend a great deal of time in school (and their lives outside of school) reading nonfiction, from newspaper articles to textbooks, from recipes to biographies, from travel brochures to informational web sites. Reading nonfiction is empowering. So often students feel like "experts" on the topics or subjects they have read about. Nonfiction reading sparks students' curiosity and opens their eyes to new worlds and different points of view. Nonfiction has so much to offer readers and is an essential genre to study.

Unit 4 Poetry

The poet Julia Cunningham says, "Poetry is, to me, a place to be. Walk with your words into these secret, mysterious, and magic places where poems lead you." Poetry is a rich and engaging genre that invites readers to study and appreciate the beauty and functions of language. It awakens their sense of the many extraordinary things they can notice in their everyday world. The genre of poetry allows readers to create new and surprising images while also uncovering meaning and exploring emotions. Through the use of rhyme, imagery, and figurative language, readers are exposed to literary devices that remain in our thoughts and create opportunities for reflection and celebration. Poetry offers something for readers of all ages and interests, and it exercises all of our imaginations. What greater joy can young readers experience than discovering something new about themselves, or their world, through reading? Poetry does this. It is the natural bridge between cognitive learning and personal expression.

Unit 5 Forces and Interactions: Force, Motion, and Magnetism

As knowledge explodes in the digital age, learning the "content" of science and social studies becomes both more challenging and also more critical. Our goal is to teach students how to build enduring understandings about content area topics through reading a variety of texts, discussing them from multiple stances, and writing from various sources. We teach students not to memorize disconnected facts but to sort through information, think about it, and analyze their own and others' perspectives—in other words, to deeply comprehend and synthesize the key information.