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
Running and Reading Logs Part II
In this second video in a two-part series, Clare Landrigan meets with a group of 4th graders to talk about reading logs and goals. In this excerpt, Clare confers with...
Teacher/Principal Conferring: Reflecting on Readers’ Notebooks
In this conference, Principal Karen Szymusiak and 5th grade teacher Liz Cramer discuss the ways Liz uses readers' notebooks in her classroom. Before the conference, Karen spends an evening reading...
Staying Focused in Literacy Workshops
Clare Landrigan meets with a group of fifth graders to talk about what's going well in literacy workshops, and to set individual goals. Stamina is an issue many of the...
Weekend Headlines: Whole Class Share
In this final installment of a three-part video series, Katie Doherty and her sixth-grade students continue the Weekend Headlines activity. Each Monday, students listen to Katie share some of the...
Making Predictions and Finding Evidence in Text
In this video from a fifth-grade small group, Clare Landrigan talks with students about making predictions and finding evidence in text. The text used is Jean Little's Hey World, Here...
Many Languages, Many Texts: Book Time in Preschool
In this brief video, Melissa Kolb explains "Book Time" in her preschool class. It's a time when many volunteers read books informally to small groups of children in their home...
The Books We Can’t Live Without in Our Teaching: Resource Round-Up
It was late afternoon one day last spring, almost twilight, that mellow time after children are gone and planning is finished, when conversation rambles among friends in empty classrooms. Jennifer...
Old Elm Speaks Conclusion: Connecting Poetry, Observation, and Reading
In this second installment of a three-part video series, Aimee Buckner shows how observation skills, poetry, and reading instruction come together with the mentor text Old Elm Speaks: Tree Poems...
“If You Like Matt Christopher” Student Book Share
In this video from Franki Sibberson's grades 3-4 classroom, boys share books that are similar to ones written by Matt Christopher. Franki explains how the group came about, as well...
Envisioning Writing: Wow Words and Mental Images in 1st Grade
In this minilesson, Katie DiCesare uses the book My Cat Copies Me to help her first-grade students "envision" their writing drafts. The lesson focuses on creating mental images to conjure...
First Grade Small Group: Chunking
In this small group from Courtney Tomfohr's first-grade classroom, students work on their chunking skills. Courtney begins the lesson with a whiteboard, moves to authentic text, and gives children a...
Conferring with Colin
In this reading conference with Colin, Joan Moser (of "The Sisters") helps him set a goal of working on accuracy.
Open Book Clubs
Monroe School was very pleased with their literacy instructional program. The students were encouraged to read independently and kept track of the books that they were reading in reading logs....
Demonstration Lesson: Inferring Character Traits
In this demonstration lesson from a 5th grade classroom, Clare Landrigan leads students through a reading and discussion of inference and character development. Clare uses the book Childtimes by Eloise...
What Are Reading Centers?
The term "reading centers" is challenging because it may very well suggest many different things to teachers. For this reason, I'll begin by describing what reading centers are NOT. Reading...
Conferring About Character Traits
In this conference from a fifth-grade classroom, Clare Landrigan meets with a student to reinforce learning from a whole-class lesson on inferring and character traits. Clare helps the student pull...
Multicultural Picture Books for Young Children
Children learn about the sounds of language through exposure to linguistic awareness games, nursery rhymes, and rhythmic activities. Engaging children in choral readings of rhymes and rhythms allows them to...
Small Group After Demonstration Lesson
In this small group after a demonstration lesson in a 5th grade classroom, Clare Landrigan talks through strategies for inferring the meaning of new words while reading.
Giving New Readers a Diet of More Than Leveled Books
I am going on another diet. Not one of my favorite things, but something I have to do. I know that for the diet to last through all of the...
Picking a Partner: Demonstration Lesson and Debrief
In this demonstration lesson from a K-2 classroom, Joan Moser leads students through guided practice in picking a partner. In the debrief with Natalie, Joan talks through issues and...
Student Reading Interview: Assessing Ana Part 2
This is the second video in a two-part series. Principal Karen Szymusiak interviewed Ana, a second grader, to learn more about her strengths and needs as a reader. In this...
