Reading Instruction
Reading Instruction: Daily Structure (based on Teachers College format)
Read aloud – 15-20 minutes/day
Objectives: Build a community of readers through modeling with wonderful narratives, nonfiction and poetry
• High-interest texts (a combination of picture books, short texts and chapter books)
• Teacher models reading with fluency and expression
• Teacher does “think-alouds” to demonstrate the use of a wide range of reading strategies
Reading Workshop – 50-60 minutes/day
Objectives: Explicit instruction, predictable procedure and extended time with student “eyes on text”
• Mini-lesson – using touchstone text (10 minutes)
• Students read independently in their “just-right-books” / teacher conducts guided reading strategy instruction OR one-on-one conferences (20 minutes)
• Mid-workshop teaching point – based on teacher observation, either strategy or procedure based
• (2-3 minutes)
• Students go back to their independent reading (20 minutes) / teacher conducts another guided reading group OR one-on-one conferences
• Whole class: teaching point OR share. Examples: highlight a specific strategy or reading habit; management reinforcement; revisit something taught previously to reinforce the point that strong readers use everything they know, not just the “strategy-of-the-day”; fishbowl partner-talk. (5-10 minutes)
Reading Strategies: “The Big 4”
• Envisionment: when we read we create movies in our minds by…
• Tracking our characters and noticing what they see, hear, touch and notice
• Noticing our character’s feelings and picturing how the character looks, talks, and moves while feeling this way
• Filling in the missing parts of the story by drawing on the text and all we have experienced in our lives
• Revising our mental pictures when what we’re picturing doesn’t fit with what the text says
• Accumulating the Text: as we read, we collect information and carry it across a story by…
• Asking, “how does this new scene or event fit with what happened in the story previously?”
• Noticing changes in how a character acts depending on the situation he or she is in
• Thinking about what’s happening in the story now, what came before, and how it all fits together
• Confirming our initial ideas and extending them
• Prediction: when we read, we think forward and make predictions by…
• Paying attention to details that seemed a little odd and we think about how these details may affect the story
• Noticing moments of tension and wondering what will happen next
• Picturing how things happen in our lives and using this to help us think about what may happens in the lives of our characters
• Paying attention to the characters’ relationships and comparing them to what we know about relationships between people in the world, and then using this to think about how a character might act
• Determining Importance: when we read, we focus our attention on things that feel important to the story by…
• Noticing our character’s traits and using this to explain our character’s hopes, wants, concerns and troubles
• Noticing big details and asking, “what’ really going on here?”
• Paying close attention to things that recur in the story and pausing to understand why
Secondary Reading Strategies:
Retelling
Inferring character traits
Summarizing
Cause and effect
Comparing and contrasting
Developing theories about characters
Making personal connections and text-to-text connections
Seeing patterns within and across books
Wondering
