In my classroom, 'language arts' is broken down into sub-categories. They are reading workshop, writing workshop, making meaning, handwriting and read-a-louds. While it is similar to Book Club Plus there are a few differences. I am in a fifth grade classroom, so my students are at different reading levels. The DRA was just administer and the students ranged from level 24 to level 70 (so second grade to seventh grade). So one challenge we have is making sure all students are being pushed however some are not bored while others are not lost.
The Making Meaning unit is all about the students comprehension of stories and is very similar to chapter 3 in Book Club Plus. This is a scripted way of teaching comprehension and the instruction is very clear so the students know what to do. In fifth grade, some of the main focuses are 'text to text' and 'text to self' or as the book calls it making Intertextual connections. The students are asked to predict, question and use clues to help them while they are reading. Today's lesson was about inferring and reading between the lines. During making meaning, the teacher does a read aloud however the teaching is mostly peer to peer.
During reading workshops, the students mostly silent read. However, small groups will be asked to read with a teacher or each other. The students will meet about every 7-10 school days to see progress they are making with their 'just right' books as well as making sure they are understanding their book. Reading workshop starts off each day with a mini-lesson then the students break off into their areas. Also, once a week students will be asked to write a journal entry about their books. My teacher also is reading a chapter book aloud for 20 minutes per day.
Writing workshop has not yet been formally placed into my classroom yet. However, starting today the students were learning the formal editing steps and starting their haircut or bad hair story. Before this the students were working on small moments and using detail writing to describe these small moments. The students also have a hand writing lesson twice a week for 10 minutes.
My students are able to 'write into a text' because while in making meaning the teacher often ask how does this relate back to your life? Does something like this happen in your family? These are called self to text connections. However they are done verbally in my classroom. 'Writing through the text' is something the students do however right now we are in the modeling stage in making meaning so it is being done as an entire class. 'Writing out of the text' is one my students are working on right now. In their journals they are asked to reflect upon what they are reading and respond critically. Linking stories to stories is a common one that we are doing in fifth grade.
Megan,
ReplyDeleteIt was very interesting to read about your literacy framework in the classroom. It is much different then what I am seeing so far in my classroom. Although we have time set aside for read-alouds, silent reading and writing. I don’t see as much literacy as it seems you do! I loved reading about how your classroom breaks up these different parts of literacy throughout the week, and they are very similar to my pre-service teaching classrooms, where literacy was a large block of the day. In my classroom, I am not seeing the focus of that yet, I see a lot of math and a lot of social studies. I also think this is because my students are quite far behind in math, not entering 5th grade with all of their 4th grade knowledge. This makes it a little challenging. I do however feel like subjects are very much cross curricular, so literacy is being used in most of the day. We are also doing a lot of writing out of the text in my classroom. You said that students reflect on what they have learned and respond. We have a reader’s reflection notebook in which they write responses to the read aloud that we are doing. This combines, listening, reading and writing in our afternoon. This is the biggest part of literacy I have seen thus far in the school year. I am excited to see how literacy will be blocked throughout the week once MEAP prep is over. Part of the prompts we use in our reader’s reflection is making text to self connections. We are using a lot of these making connections during the read aloud. It is really exciting to see the connections the students make! I enjoyed learning about the way literacy works in your classroom and I look forward to chatting with you about what you think works well and what you think doesn’t work well/what you would change!
From,
Shannon