Reading

Read alouds are a time for students to listen to a story, informational book, poetry, or other types of text. The teacher facilitates by thinking aloud, pointing out key features, and asking open-ended questions. Read alouds help expand students vocabulary, speaking and listening skills, along with being a lot of fun!

Shared reading includes a large or zoomed in text that the students read with the teacher. This allows for fluency and word solving practice. High interest texts, poems, songs, and riddles get students excited to read along. Shared reading can often be a jumping off point for shared writing.

Guided reading is small group work where students read books at their instructional level. That means they can read most of the book independently, but still need some support with challenging words, sentence structures, and meaning. The teacher works with students who need support in the same skills and uses carefully designed lessons that allow students to engage in a productive struggle. It's all about helping students develop skills and strategies they can use while reading independently.

Reading mini lessons are quick and explicit lessons that focus on teaching students reading strategies to use when reading independently. Often read aloud texts will be used to model how to analysis literature and non fiction texts. The whole group will look at the structure, elements, and characteristics of many genres. Often teachers make charts of the collaborative work during the lesson, so students can refer to them later on.

Independent reading is the time when students transfer everything they have learned in whole and small group work into books they choose to read. Sometime students choose books from the school or classroom library, and other times they practice guided reading books. Often students are found in comfy places around the room curled up reading.

Students first choose from a selection of books which they would most like to read. The teacher forms groups and helps facilitate. Students read the text independently and mark pages, take notes, or complete an assignment that they share with their book club periodically throughout reading the book. This is a great chance for students to work on speaking and listening skills while connecting what they have studied during reading mini lessons in an independent text. Reading a book together helps each of the students' understanding grow.