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
Making the Most of Short Texts
The Common Core State Standards are still on the horizon for 5th grade in my district. But, like the first time you see the distant, shadowy shape of Pikes Peak...
Previewing a Book with an Eighth Grader
In this brief conference, Katie Baydo-Reed chats with an eighth grader as he previews The Wednesday Wars and makes connections to the main character.
Children’s Literature for the Olympics
The 2014 Winter Olympics are about to get underway in Sochi, Russia. Soon the 24/7 coverage of the games will begin. We’ll watch video clips of athletes training, hear the...
Explanatory Grammar Moves: Getting Verbal with It
The Common Core asks 8th graders to understand the use of verbals -- gerunds, infinitives, and participles. To keep myself from becoming verbally abusive, I will write about only one...
Making Classics Relevant for Middle School Students
I stumbled into a job as an English teacher based largely on the legs of one book. I was so inspired by Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird that it...
Conferring with Sebastian
Katie DiCesare chats with first grader Sebastian in this one-minute conference, then shares her reflections on where Sebastian might go next in his reading.
Liberty and Dystopia: February Literacy Contracts
Since it is February and we celebrate President’s Day this month, we focus on government and leadership in reading. We chose dystopian literature as the theme of the February Literacy Contract. ...
The Shape of Stories
One of the first language arts units of study I teach combines narrative structure in reading workshop and writing narratives in writing workshop. To help students understand exactly what I...
Act III: Exploring Subtext with A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Shakespeare and the Common Core Series)
The Common Core states that high school students should be able to “adjust their use of spoken, written, and visual language to communicate effectively with a variety of audiences and...
Exploring Inferring with Second Graders: Part 1
Linda Karamatic uses read alouds to begin the process of building an inferring chart with her second-grade students.
Whole Class Research Planning in 4th Grade
Andrea Smith's students brainstorm how to proceed with their owl habitat research project.
Act II: Understanding Hamlet Through Close Reading (Shakespeare and the Common Core Series)
I love to start out the study of Hamlet with these instructions for my students: "Number your paper from 1-4. In this order, write down your name, your mother's name,...
Penguins Are Amazing!: Informational Writing Comes Alive in Kindergarten
Gathered at the carpet one rainy February day, I said to my kindergartners, “We are going to begin researching penguins today. Do you know what it means to do research?’...
Common Core Research Shifts
As expository writing becomes more integrated in Common Core, many changes are occurring in my classroom as I redefine student research. There are four shifts that I am making with...
Act I: Delving into Deep Questions with Macbeth (Shakespeare and the Common Core Series)
The Common Core State Standards describe students who are “college and career ready” as exhibiting the following qualities: demonstrating independence building strong content knowledge responding to the varying demands of...
Tracking Characters: A Conferring Tip
Aimee Buckner teaches a fourth grader a strategy for using a sticky note to keep track of characters when there are multiple narrators in a novel.
A Closer Look at Engagement
Yesterday I sat with a small group of first graders during reader’s workshop discussing characters in a book we were reading. I took a second to glance up and around...
Journeys and Quests: January Literacy Contracts
January is the month of new beginnings, resolutions, and transformations. We love the month of January in the school year because we’ve got long stretches of teaching time. There is...
Modeling Annotation in 8th Grade
Katie Baydo-Reed models how to annotate text for her eighth graders.
Tell Me More
I’ll tell anyone who listens that the women who care for my own children are brilliant. Every afternoon, when I slip my shoes off, wash my hands, and step carefully...
Explanatory Grammar Moves: Right-Branching Sentences
There is a secret that writers know about grammar: it’s the power of the right-branching sentence. It’s easy to navigate for novice and expert writers alike, and on top of...
