Ms. Marshall's Reading Workshop

One of my major goals is to teach my students to read strategically. During the course of the year, students in my class will improve their reading comprehension skills by participating in reading workshop.  I model strategies and then gradually release the responsibilty to the students until they use the skills independently.  The purpose of reading workshop is to show students how to think when they are reading and how to self-monitor their comprehension.  While reading, the students are documenting their "thinking" by writing on sticky notes. They compile their work into their Think Prints notebook.  Students will also use a variety of graphic organizers such as Venn Diagrams to arrange their thoughts.  The strategies are usually introduced by reading fictional stories.  However, students apply reading workshop skills in the content areas such as science and social studies.

Comprehension Strategies:

• Using schema (background knowledge)
• Making predictions (P)
• Making text to self connections (T-S)
• Making text to text connections (T-T)
• Making text to world connections (T-W)                                        
• Making mental images
• Asking questions
• Inferring
• Clarifying Vocabulary
• Summarizing
• Determining the theme of a story
• Synthesizing

References: Reading with Meaning, Debbie Miller and Strategies That Work, 2nd edition, Stephanie Harvey and Anne Goudvis.