How to Start Your Reading Workshop | Beginning of the School Year

the beginning of the year is all about establishing your routines and procedures but it's also a time to get to know your students their likes their dislikes their personalities and where they stand academically but how do we go about starting out and doing all of the things that we have to do at the very beginning of the year this really just helps us be successful as we start to get into our content our teaching the meat of everything that we do so in this video i'm going to be sharing with you an idea for how to start your reading workshop hello everyone my name is bridget svackman i'm a multi-age teacher in central pennsylvania i teach 4th 5th and 6th grade learners across all subject areas before we jump in i have a big announcement the bridging literacy community is officially open in fact it's going to be the final time that it's open for new members this year so this is a place where 3rd through 6th grade ela teachers can join in order to become a master of their content while also providing authentic and integrated reading and writing instruction to their students i'm going to leave a link down in the description box for you guys to go and check out a little bit more information regarding the bridging literacy community and of course if you have any questions at all be sure to email us at bridget theletteredclassroom.com okay so how do we tackle this idea of a starting reading workshop in upper elementary school well the first things first you have to start with a goal you have to have some form of a goal in mind have an end point go ahead and start thinking about what do i want the my reading workshop to actually look like what are some of the objectives that i would like for my students to be able to show or demonstrate as we're getting and we're preparing for this year-long workshop where we're going to be learning and engaging ourselves in lots and lots of content so to do this i like to think of kind of the essentials what are those essential components that i really want students to be able to do in order to make my reading workshop successful this can come in so many different ways from being able to work collaboratively with other peers in their class being able to work independently and submitting things on time having ability to be able to reflect on their assignments and where they can also improve so setting goals and then finally writing is going to be a really big component for me so with this in mind we need to focus on activities that is going to help us achieve our goals and meet these expectations this is going to be the time for you to set the stage little by little now remember you don't want to overwhelm them in the very beginning so you want to find activities and resources that are really going to help to engage your kids introduce these elements a piece by piece as you build on it so that way your students are successful when we give them little snippets pieces at a time they have the ability to really kind of focus themselves they know the expectation of the lesson and then you can just rinse repeat and continue on until you finally have it to the point where you feel as though you can run a really well-oiled reading workshop machine so i want to give you an example of this for me the beginning of the year is all about establishing collaboration collaboration to me is built in engagement it is an automatic winner with my students so i incorporate a lot of collaborative activities at the very beginning of the year when we have those opportunities to collaborate with our peers we're going to become more passionate and excited about the work that they're that we're doing so i make a collaboration one of my main focuses at the very start of the school year and you have to remember too collaboration is not something that comes naturally we have to teach kids how to collaborate we have to teach kids how to agree and disagree and so this element because there is so much involved with it i like to do it at the very beginning of the year because i can do really fun exciting engaging activities that are not necessarily focused on the curriculum the content because that can come later on i do things that are either review or something that i feel as though it's going to be pretty easy for my students to grasp that way i can always make sure that they are ensuring that they're collaborative that we're working on those essential skills in order for them to be successful and have fun of course so each year i approach reading workshop and writing workshop by talking about genres this is our very first collaborative activity that we will do other than just the get to know you activities at the beginning of the year this is the one that has a little bit of content when it comes to reading and writing genres dictate everything that we do in reading and writing at the beginning of the year and throughout the year genres are also a way that i organize my library so it makes it a really great starting point so that my students can have an idea of how i organize it but also get a great idea of where they like to start gathering their books as readers so like i mentioned i like to start with genres genres is a great way for me to engage my students in something that's fun collaborative but also that's going to kind of giving a tipping point for all of the other content that we're going to be discussing in the year okay so i want to give you an idea for how you can incorporate genres into your own reading workshop and to do this the first thing that you have to do is identify the genres that you're going to focus on stay broad and keep it manageable at the beginning of the year you can always go back and while you're teaching or introducing a specific type of text kind of break it down a little bit further so that students start to understand some of those subcategories that are out there so once you have the categories that you are going to focus on at the very beginning of the year then you want to select some texts that are going to help you and having students be able to categorize those genres be strategic make sure that you're curating versus just acquiring the books from your shelves in order to fill this genre okay so you want to make sure that the the books that you are selecting the picture books whatever it might be are going to be things that are pretty obvious that are going to really stick out to your students that are going to have images that really allow them to see the characteristics or those elements of that specific genre i like to try to keep about to three to four different types of text that students are going to look at you don't want to overwhelm them with a ton of different texts because then it's just going to become the race against time so find a really good number i would say about three or four texts for that specific genre i want to show you a little resource that i have for the bridging literacy community as far as how we go about approaching this activity so within the community we have an activity that's called journey through the genres and so for this i have already pre-selected all of the different genres that we are going to be discussing and sharing with our students or we're going to have them analyze this a little bit further and so here what i've done is to make it a little bit more engaging exciting and fun it's going to be a journey the kids are going through a passport like they have a passport and they're going to be traveling all of the different genres that are out there so to gather the text what we did is we strategically focused on specific texts that will find those elements um and then we took little excerpts and we put them on the back to create a postcard at every single genre they're going to have these uh postcards on the back that they will be able to read and analyze and search for the characteristics of that specific genre so make sure that you're being strategic even if you don't specifically use like excerpts that you're typing up for your students you can have sticky notes you can have pages open specifically in certain areas of certain text that you want your students to really focus on give them a nice good focus especially at the beginning of the year because you want them to kind of zero in on what the whole focus of the lesson is again you go a little bit too much and you give them too many things it just becomes overwhelming and it's going to end up stressing them out so help them by giving them specific areas that you want them looking at so once i have all of my text selected for each of those genres i'm going to place my students into groups now i typically try to stick around like the three numbers so three or four different students and then those students will get together in their groups and they are going to kind of go around all of the different texts now you can of course do this in so many different ways you could do a jigsaw with your students you can do this entirely together where kids are just kind of looking at one specific text and they're sharing their ideas to the entire class or you can have them do this if they're a lot older maybe like fifth or sixth grade where they're going through each and every single genre and pulling out those characteristics based off of what you've kind of given them to start with remember the goal of this activity is to teach collaboration and to teach them to work together and so one of the biggest things that i will do is i will give them questions that will help guide them through having a conversation to teach them how to talk to one another but the whole focus along with the collaboration piece is to help them understand the characteristics those elements of genres so students are going to kind of pull apart and find all of those pieces for that specific genre they're going to keep a list of it and then you're going to be able to discuss this as an entire group i've had in the past where my students would create posters so you can have one group only focus on one specific genre they're going to create a poster and then they might present that together it's a little risky trying to do a presentation at the very start of the year but it's also a really great way for you to get to know your students what are they capable of how are they going to be able to work with other students are they willing to you know try new things and kind of put themselves out there so you could definitely do that or you can do something a little bit more low-key as the activity that i did for journey through the genres with the blc membership the important thing here is that my students are engaged they're working collaboratively and they're practicing those essential skills that are really going to help them throughout the year now notice i'm not starting with really big heavy content at the start of the school year yes i want to know where my students are but i can craft very specific lessons that allow me to get to know them so in within this journey through the genres activity where they're pulling out characteristics i'm looking at you know are they reading and i'm listening in i'm listening to the conversations that they're having i'm looking at the writing that they're coming up with at the very end of the activity i have all kids kind of share you know their top three favorite genres and you can do this in a very short and small writing assignment and that's a way for you to get an idea about their writing quality and what they're capable of doing so i wanted to go ahead and share with you guys the resource that i have provided with my blc members for the month of july so here is the journey through the genres activity in the beginning i go ahead and explain how to establish this lesson the purpose of this lesson but i also give some ideas for how to set up the actual groups and all of the different resources that are in here this is essentially your lesson plan for how to create the journey of the genres the activity for the beginning of the school year i also provide a characteristics for the genre this is kind of the teacher's cheat sheet to be able to um know what are the characteristics that they're looking for this is also a really great way for you to help guide your group so maybe they're stuck and they're not able to kind of really find some of the characteristics they don't really know where to go to start this is a great way for you to kind of help give them questions give them some hints on what they're going to be looking for so this is your cheat sheet and your lesson plan as a teacher the other pieces that i have inside of this are going to be um the elements for starting up your group now all of these are going to be for each of the genres that i have available so you can see here i have traditional literature poetry narrative nonfiction biography autobiography so each one is going to come with this and ins the purpose of this is for you to put this at the group it's going to give the directions for what the students are going to be working on and then it has guiding questions that they can use to help guide the group and ask one another so that they can start kind of pulling out and flushing some of their ideas i would end up laminating laminating these at those groups so that way you can use it year after year so along with this piece here that you're going to need just for helping students understand the expectations for the activity they have to have somewhere to record that information and so what we ended up doing is creating a passport so the students have their own passport for the journey through the genres and in this passport they have a section here where they have for narrative nonfiction the characteristics of the genre are and they have eight spots to be able to come up with characteristics now are they going to use them all absolutely not they're not expected to but they can absolutely fill this in as you go back and review this as a class and they can even use this to help create posters so as like a huge final activity is to have students put them in new groups and then in that group they're going to be responsible for a specific genre they create a poster so that you can hang it up into the classroom it's purposeful meaningful uh work that students are going to be able to use and see inside of their their their room um and then we also have a little spot for the purpose of the genre so each genre has its own specific purpose there but that you're also going to notice that they have sticker spots so it gives goes through all of the different types of genres give you a little sneak peek and then finally we have a my favorite genre top three and so this is going to be a way for students to be able to provide that short explanation of their favorite genre they have to explain why it is their favorite genre and give those reasons so it's a great way for you to see what their writing is going to look like at the very end of it but you're going to notice that there's some spots here for stickers and this is just another added piece that makes it fun and engaging for your students and so what we've done is we've created stickers for them and these are going to be like the stamps when they go to that specific genre here are some a look at some of the ones that we have we have historical fiction fantasy traditional literature and they are made to fit the 8293 avery label now if you don't want to spend money on labels you absolutely don't have to you can print them out on paint plain white paper and then you can hole punch them so i have just a circle punch that allows me to just punch out the circles you can punch them out and students can glue these in but i want to show you guys what this looks like because it is really really cute so here's fantasy here's my fantasy sticker so i'm going to take the sticker off and then place that here and so as students finish up with that group they're going to get to like stamp their uh their book to show that they have completed that assignment or that group itself that group for the genre um so this is their private book they get to keep this so that they can reference it as needed or they can take it home if they would like to but it's their passport for the genres another thing that we gave are some itineraries this is an easy way for you to be able to group your students so we want to provide you with all the resources possible so we make this easy um so this would be me giving this entire group the exact same itinerary so there are nine different itineraries because there are nine different genres 10 including the one that you are going to use as a model to be able to demonstrate and kind of show your thinking for how to go about locating the characteristics using all those resources but then this is going to be their private itinerary and they can always just place this here and they'll know exactly where they're going to be going um and of course the meat the best part of this activity are going to be all of the postcards the postcards are going to be the elements that allow students to be able to analyze now for my blc people i highly recommend that not only will you have these for students to be able to read and analyze and discuss but i also recommend having a few texts there that's also a great finisher activity so maybe you have one group that's finished a little bit earlier you might have a few texts on that specific genre that they can flip through look at and it's also going to be helpful when you get to like the informational piece because you'll want to show them those text features so each one comes with three postcards it has an image that corresponds to the information that's on the back and it also has where that excerpt is from so students will read these they will analyze it and discuss it using the information and the directions page that we i showed you earlier um the only other thing that i have of course are going to be the cute little banners this is going to be just another little element that allows you to make it a little bit more fun you can create the banner hang it up onto your whiteboard and then you can also write journey through the genres just to make it a little bit more fun of course you can add elements such as going and having like an airplane music in the background whatever it might be that just kind of gives it that extra little excitement piece so this is available for you if you were to join the membership right now we are going to have this available for our incoming members so that way you have a resource that you can start using right away i would say that this is going to end up taking you about two or three days of your reading workshop to kind of go through the motions discuss and talk about collaboration and how we have those collaborative moments also reflecting at the end of every single class is a really important piece too but this is going to be something that you don't have to think about that you can just get started with your students and get them excited and engaged in what the possibilities of reading workshop is going to be now remember this is only going to be available for a limited time only so if you're interested in joining the bridging literacy membership gaining access to this resource along with other resources that we have available for unpacking the anchor standards go ahead and follow that link in the description box so that you can join our community we would love to have you this is going to be the final time that the membership is open and it will not reopen until 2022. so guys thank you so much for watching if you have any questions regarding anything about the bridging literacy membership follow the links down in the description box or you can email me at bridget theletteredclassroom.com we'll be happy to answer any questions that you have regarding this membership so guys thank you so much for watching this video i hope that you have now an activity that you can go out and use and start your reading workshop and a better and clearer image of what you're going to be doing at the start of the year to help ensure that you have a successful and well-oiled workshop machine so guys thank you so much for watching i hope that you enjoyed this video go ahead and give it a like so that it can help support us and what we are doing here at the lettered classroom also make sure to subscribe and hit that notification bell so that you can get notified every time i go live or i upload a new video again thank you so much for watching and i will catch you all next time bye

Channel: The Lettered Classroom

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Keywords: teacher tips, The Lettered Classroom, classroom decor, first year teacher, classroom setup, classroom organization, a day in the life of a teacher, elementary teacher, middle school teacher, education, how to be a teacher, how to teach, new teacher, teacher youtuber, teacher vlog, weekly teacher vlog, classroom ideas, elementary teacher, classroom inspirations, teacher organization, upper elementary teacher, teacher life

Id: hCXFvP7AbAo

Length: 18min 56sec (1136 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 25 2021