How does the book club model compare and contrast with what you are learning about literacy instruction in your classroom context? Where do you see reading, writing, speaking, listening, viewing and other literacies in your classroom literacy program? What opportunities do students have to write into a unit/text, through a unit/text, or out of a unit/text?
The book club model is actually very similar to what I see and know about what happens in my classroom. Every day the students do at least 45 minutes of independent reading. They have reading notebooks that they keep track of their reading and also write retells, summaries, and anything else they feel they need to work on to become a better reader. This is part of the reading workshop that is used in the room. They also have writing workshop that they spend 45 minutes a day writing. We have yet to do much of the workshop part of writing but my mentor teacher says next marking period we will.
I know that there are certain books in the classroom library that are marked as book club books. They are books that my teacher has three or more of. These books will be used later in the year for the students to have book club, but for now they may be chosen for independent reading.
We also do a read aloud after lunch everyday where the students have the chance to focus on certain aspects of reading each day. Some examples are summaries, list of characters or vocabulary words, setting, problem and solution.
We also have a classroom meeting everyday where students have the ability to voice concerns. There are certain things where everyone in the group must have something to tell the group. On Mondays this is usually what they did over the weekend. Students are also listening to the teacher and other students during this time.
The students have the opportunity to write into, through, and out of a text on a daily basis. They are able to do all of these for each text that they read, but it is up to them during their reading workshop time to figure out what they need to work on as a reader to become better. They also have the chance to do all of these after read aloud.
We have a writers workshop as well. We normally give them some kind of topic to write about. We give them examples in our everyday lives and they go back and brainstorm. Our system is a little different then yours. Since we are about to work on personal essays we have been having our students write down ideas about their lives. Some ideas we have given them is: the most awkward thing that has happened to me, my 5 more interesting relatives, a camp experience, favorite childhood games, etc. We have what is called seed ideas, that they write in the back of their notebooks. This is where they brainstorm their ideas before writing anything. After they have a few seed ideas, they are able to choose a few to start writing about. They write in the front of their notebooks. I think it is a really cool system my mentor has set up. I can see myself using this idea in my classroom.
ReplyDeleteOur re-alouds are right after lunch as well. I've noticed it calms the students down before starting work again. I can see myself using this idea as well. We just finished our first book. Now we are making a class picture book to help us retell the story. We asked the students to brainstorm important events that happened in the book. We were able to brainstorm enough for the entire class. Each student choose one to work on. They are responsible for drawing out the scene. They must use a lot of detail in order to retell it. So far it's been working out great. I am excited to see what it looks like when it's finished.