New Teacher, New Plan

To give a little bit of prior knowledge to my book club group: my students have just started going regularly to a reading teacher three school days ago. When looking at the Complete Literacy System graph on page 3 of Book Club plus, I see some similarities with the chart and with what I have seen happen within the classroom. A literacy block has not yet started but the reading teacher has discussed with me that one will be starting soon. Students will come together with either her or I to read in groups of similar reading levels. While one teacher is monitoring the literacy block the other teacher will be working with the rest of the class. We are planning on pulling each group to the literacy block once or twice a week. Writer’s workshop has been seen used once with my homeroom teacher. Students read a story together and then talked about the setting, characters, and the layout of the story (beginning, middle, end). After students discussed they have been using this outline to plan and write. I have talked with the reading teacher and we will be starting more writer’s workshop soon. I have participated in Teacher read alouds; I have read students picture books and then discussed with them what happened in the story. The students and I have also participated in a shared reading. This particular shared reading was a readers’ theater. The students stood in front of the class, read their lines, and listened to others read it. I have not yet seen shared reading in small groups. I look forward to implementing this when I am the lead teacher. I have seen independent reading with my homeroom teacher. Students have read short stories, discussed the story in a whole group setting, and then answered questions on a worksheet.

During the first lesson with the reading teacher, she went through their new text books. The textbooks had a chart of different reading strategies. She read each one, gave examples, discussed with the students about each one, and practiced a few of them. They scanned through the book and one of them saw a picture of a dog jumping a fence. Another student talked about their dog jumping fences. She noted that already this student was using a reading strategy: accessing prior knowledge. During her discussion she told the students that while reading they should be utilized one or more than one of these strategies. Tomorrow, I will be starting a lesson focusing on text to self connections. I talked with my reading CT about this and she agreed that it would be a great way to continue working on reading strategies and comprehension. I will be reading a book titled “Chrysanthemum” about a mouse named Chrysanthemum who loves her name, but at the first day of school students make fun of her name. My students will be making text-to-self connections by talking with their parents about their names and then writing about what they found out.

When looking at the reading teacher’s roles in instruction and comprehension strategies: she has had very high control and the students have had very low activity. She has been giving very explicit instruction but I know she is planning on moving away from that and more towards students having a very high participation rate and high activity rate, while she and I are giving less instruction and less scaffolding. But before we get there, she is doing a lot of modeling and scaffolding this week to help build students comprehension strategies. It will be interesting to observe and work with the new reading teacher to see this transition take place.