Introduction to Readers and Writers Workshop:
This unit will introduce your students to the procedure and routines in a readers and writers’ workshop. Best practice indicates it takes a solid six weeks for students to establish procedures and routines they are expected to use to assist them on their road to reading and writing independence. This time is also a wonderful time to get your students to get acquainted with their readers and writers notebooks.
Unit Two:
Author/Craft Study:
Examining the literary works of children’s favorite authors will have benefits that will last a lifetime. Through an effective author/craft study students are given the opportunity to utilize these works as mentor text and apply authors’ crafts to their own writing.
Unit Three: (Elementary)
Unit Three: (Elementary)
Debbie Miller says, “We must teach our students what nonfiction is. Teaching our students that expository text has predictable characteristics and features they can count on before they read allows them to construct meaning more easily as they read.”
This is the imperative reason for this unit of study. Students need to explore and be immersed in nonfiction text throughout this unit. Students need to be able to identify text features (glossary, captions, maps, etc) to help them understand how these features support their comprehension. Teaching students how to understand nonfiction text should be done through explicit instruction. Reading nonfiction is very different than reading fiction. Teaching students about nonfiction features, the functions they serve, and how to recognize them will help students to be successful readers of nonfiction (Bamford & Kristo, 2000). You will even find that the most reluctant reader will enjoy this genre study.
Students need to know:
· Nonfiction books are organized around specific topics.
· Nonfiction books give readers factual information.
· When readers read nonfiction books they make predictions about the kinds of things they expect to learn.
· Nonfiction books have features distinguishingly different than nonfiction.
· Nonfiction books are read differently than fiction.
Please remember many buildings have gray nonfiction tubs to support this unit of study. These should be in your book rooms.
The writing requirements within this unit are different at each grade level. This is indicated in your pacing guides. The writing window has opened and does not close until March. Your building level literacy coaches or I have resources available to support this unit. If you need any resources or assistance please don’t hesitate to ask. So join your students and explore the wonderful world of nonfiction.
Unit Four: Narrative Story
“Summarizing is part of synthesis. You can’t synthesize if you don’t know how to summarize. Summarizing is the act of briefly presenting the main point. When teaching summary, teachers should encourage readers to retell information by including important ideas but not telling too much.”
Stephanie Harvey
During this unit students will be practicing their summarizing and retelling skills. Summarizing and retelling information is an important literacy skill. By having students produce summaries or a retell of the stories they are reading you are able to check for understanding and observe if the students can communicate what is important (main idea) from the story.
During this unit they will also be developing and enhancing their synthesizing and inferencing comprehension skills. These skills assist students in developing a deeper meaning of text.
They will also begin the last writing piece during this unit and complete during unit five. Remember to immerse your students in narrative or persuasive mentor text (whichever one you have chosen to do for the last piece).
