Year 1- As a new teacher I followed suite with the other teachers on my team and began teaching our newly adopted Literacy By Design-Rigby. It was one of the first programs of its kind! Rigby included reading, writing, and phonics. The reading program was designed around the comprehension strategies and leveled books were included for student use. Great, right? That first year I followed the program verbatim. Something was missing though. My kids weren’t using any of these comprehension strategies outside of Rigby.
Learn more about Rigby: http://rigby.hmhco.com/en/literacydesign_home.htm
Year 2- My feet were wet. Over the summer I read many professional books about the instruction of reading: Reading with Meaning, Strategies that Work, and Mosaic of Thought and I realized I was doing all the thinking. I wasn’t requiring my kids to do much thinking outside of my mini-lesson. Not quite ready to completely change the structure of my Reader’s Workshop I still used Rigby, now only as a resource. I slowly began implementing mini-lessons of my own. Some of the lessons came from my professional books while others came from great online resources. I was noticing a slightly difference in my students. They were beginning to share with me more about what they were thinking while they were reading. Lots of, “Did you know…?” and “I can’t believe…”
Year 3- This year I had an entirely new team to work with. We all made our goal to develop Reader’s Workshop lessons that would fit the needs of our students and help them read to learn. We followed the scope and sequence of our previous reading program, Rigby, and designed ten mini-lessons to go with each strategy. We also developed assessments that simply showed the thinking students were doing while they read. I was truly following a workshop approach for the first time! My Reader’s Workshop began with a 10 minute mini-lesson, 30 minutes of independent but focused reading time (books self selected) and ending with a 5 minute share. My students were no longer just sharing, they were inferring, questioning, and synthesizing.
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