Choice Lit Topic: Teaching Reading
Our contributors lead reading workshops in classrooms with creative flair. Over the past 12 years, we’ve filled our site with loads of suggestions, tools, and tips for using engaging books throughout the curriculum to hook kids on reading. Here is where you will find many stories of successful and not-so-successful workshop days, and what we learned from them. We bring these stories to life through hundreds of video examples.
Results
Building a Next-Read Nonfiction Stack
Katherine Sokolowski helps fifth grader Jack build a next-read stack of nonfiction, highlighting a variety of text features and historical references.
A Community Reads “Wonder”
Author C. Alexander London wrote, “It’s a fact: people can survive without books. People can even have wonderful, full lives without books. But they can’t endure without community, and community...
Peer Support in Writing Workshop: Conferring with Jaden
Christy Rush-Levine meets with eighth grader Jaden, who talks through his struggles in writing a conclusion to his literary analysis, and how his peers helped him improve the writing.
Choose Your Own Grammar Adventure
It is winter. You are an English teacher, and you are starting to notice that lazy grammar errors are sneaking into your high school students’ writing. You review a few...
Questioning Within Read Alouds
Throughout the year, I have been studying and implementing strategies to increase the quantity and the quality of the questions students ask within their classrooms. In the past, I have...
Leveraging Read Aloud
Nobody has ever told the language arts teachers at my middle school to stop reading aloud to students, but administrators have questioned us about the practice. As a result of...
Big Question Minilesson
Katherine Sokolowski models how readers make choices as questions arise while reading independently, and demonstrates how she moves between a novel and Web resources.
One Text, Many Lessons
During our prep for state testing, Alex wrote lead after lead in her on-demand narrative pieces that mimicked the structure and phrasing of Owl Moon. She knew the lead to...
Close Attention and Reading Response: Conferring with Tori
Christy confers with eighth grader Tori about her reading response to Why We Broke Up. She encourages Tori to make connections between the characters in her current book and her...
Revising Thinking Through Multiple Readings
Sara’s hand flies into the air, waving frantically as she calls out, “Oh, I know! Maybe everyone in Miss Strangeworth’s family wrote mean letters, so she has to carry on...
Questions for Rereaders
When I was a young reader and first discovered Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie, I loved it so much that I read it again. And again. And...
Bin of the Week
“These books are actually dusty!” exclaimed Bob. Bob and I were putting some newly acquired books in the appropriate bins in his classroom library. During our work, we discovered that...
Why Bother? Practical Answers to Questions About Close Reading
It’s no secret that most language arts teachers tend to approach their work with a sense of urgency. They can’t help it. It’s just that there is a finite amount...
Stop and Inquire
“Did Washington really chop down a cherry tree?” In the middle of a minilesson about the French and Indian War, I introduced George Washington as a young soldier in his...
Goals to Habits in First Grade
When I sat down to confer with Grace, I was surprised when the focus of the conversation quickly changed to my own reading, specifically a reading goal that I had...
Flash Forward with New Students
In my experience, student scheduling begins in the spring and is not finalized until midsummer, at best. However, this year, our principal pledged to make a change. Not only did...
Teaching Fifth Graders to Make Peer Recommendations
Katherine Sokolowski scaffolds Liam and Caden through the process of learning to recommend books to each other.
“If You Like” Reading Recommendations Conference
Katherine Sokolowski confers with fifth grader Taryn, connecting her love of Rick Riordan books with other reading possibilities.
Reaction and Intention: Rethinking the Library in Early Winter
I was browsing through my files in Google Drive, looking for something else, when I ran across a presentation that was a few years old. One slide confidently asserted that...
QR Code Listening Stations
Many classrooms have a listening station to replicate the benefits of classroom read-alouds in literacy stations. Yet, in my experience, listening stations are one of the most difficult stations to...
Making Co-Teaching Work
For four years, we had the fortunate circumstance of being placed together as co-teachers in a fourth-grade classroom. For four years, we got the opportunity to know each other only...
