Laura Robb
Reading Workshop: Essential Reading Experiences

As you conduct a workshop, choose reading experiences that enable you to interact with students and monitor their progress. The reading experiences that drive my workshop are:

Teacher Read-Alouds: daily read-alouds introduce students to a variety of genres, improve listening and recall skills, and enable the teacher to think aloud and model reading strategies.

Strategy Mini-Lessons: demonstrate reading strategies and how they can help solve reading problems. These can be whole or small group or for the one student who needs more explanation.

Guided Practice: the whole class practices a strategy with the teacher after a mini-lesson. Students who require extra support continue to practice in small groups on other days.

Independent Free-Choice Reading While students read, teachers can hold short one-on-one conferences, giving students individualized support on selecting readable and interesting books.

Strategic-Reading Groups Pairs or small groups of students with similar needs work with the teacher on understanding and applying reading strategies.

Literature Discussion Groups Small heterogeneous groups talk about books they've read that relate to a theme and/ or author study.

Vocabulary-Building and Word Study: vocabulary instruction occurs before, during, and after reading. Students study the meanings of prefixes, suffixes, and roots.

Conferring: teachers hold brief one-on-one meetings with students to observe and support how they apply strategies to reading.

Note: with the exception of the teacher read-aloud, these activities do not have to occur every day, especially wthin a 45-minute class.