columbia teacher's college reading and writing project

My school is in it's third year of implementing writer's workshop.  Each year, our students know more about writer's workshop and have improved stamina and skills, which is really exciting.  In kindergarten, however, it's a different story; with a large free and reduced lunch population, our students come with a huge range in pre-academic skills like drawing, letter formation and recognition and knowledge of sound letter recognition.

  In many classrooms, there are never enough materials to do our job.  So we teachers go to the library -school and public, we borrow from other teachers or our home and we especially create materials.  Unfortunately, teacher created materials take a lot of time.  To lead a balanced life, teachers must work to become more and more efficient without lowering the quality of our instruction.

There are so many terrific books and therefor so many terrific read alouds.  Most of them, with a little ingenuity, can be used for various comprehension think-alouds, turn 'n talks, stop 'n jots or stop 'n acts.  What can be tricky is when you're trying to find a book for a particular comprehension strategy.  For example, if I want to do a reading workshop unit on making connections because my 1st graders have a limited understand of it, or because I want my 5th graders to go deeper into activating their background knowledge and making text-to-text and text-to-world connections that matter, then I need to find books that allow me to model the strategy through a think-aloud AND allow my students to access the material, find relevance and make thei

For literacy, I love this school district site: www.wrsd.net/literacy 

On this site, I find scripted mini-lessons for those really important lessons and a year-long calendar of readers workshop minilessons which contains the meat of a teaching objective.  Go to the left-hand side of the page and hover over Elementary Curriculum, then look at both the focus lessons, which are scripted, and the unit trajectories, or curriculum maps. 

Even though it's January, some of my third and fourth graders still frequently struggle with generating or brainstorming ideas on what to write about.  (We did do a "detour" from Lucy's plan and do expositiory writing for a while.  So, we're just getting back into the swing of narrative writing.)  I know part of the problem is that many of my students have so much to worry about every day that they see many stories in their life as being too old and therefore not relevant.  But I cannot do anything about that.

At our first VES Professional Reading Group 2009-2010 meeting we covered a great deal in a very short period of time. 

The main highlights of our first meeting studying Units of Study were:

• Covering the lessons the first time around seems to take much longer than expected
• We decided we needed to create a mentor text list per grade level. Please Check this out:and THANK YOU Seattle!

http://www.eledblog.com/content/writers-workshop-book-lists-units-and-comprehension-strategies#comment-190

Do you find that peer editing is helpful with your elementary writers?  If so, please share some ideas and suggestions for what you do!!  :)

Attached are Writers Workshop Book Lists that I created labeled by grade level.  Each list is differentiate by Lucy Calkins Units of Study as well as Comprehension Skills and is useful for anyone needing to teach a specific type of literacy lesson.