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I've been approached by many teachers who ask me, if you don't use reading logs to monitor how... Click To Tweet

According to experts like Penny Kittle, Donalyn Miller, and Kelly Gallagher, giving students choice in what they read is paramount in getting kids to read more and to read better. While I would love to institute a full-blown Reader's Workshop in my classroom, I have other curriculum requirements that I must meet. Therefore I do a modified RW schedule.

Three days a week (usually Monday, Wednesday, and Friday) my students read for 20-25 minutes at the beginning of the hour. They can read anything they want, and I have been working hard to provide a classroom library for them to choose from (however they can also hit up the school Media Center if I don't have what they are looking for). During the time the students read, I either conference with them about their reading or I read alongside them.

Once the reading time is over, students get out their reader's notebooks. I give students 4-5 minutes to respond to their reading. They can respond anyway they want, but I always put up a suggestion in case they need it. This past week's suggestions included:

"Describe a cause-effect relationship in your book, or create a multi-flow map showing causes and effects of one of the conflicts in your book."

"Create a bubble map to describe one or more characters in your book."

"Write about how you connect to something (or someone) in your book."

"Write a letter to a character in your book giving them your opinion about what is going on and what they should do about it."

Because I can only conference with 3-4 students during a 20-minute reading session, having my students write after they read ensures all my students are thinking about what they read. I strictly enforce the no talking while writing rule, and now that we are halfway through the school year, it has become a regular part of our classroom routine.

Our Reader's Notebooks aren't just for accountability after reading time, though. My students also keep track of words that they don't know, quotes they love, grammar constructions that we have studied that they see in their own books, and more. They use them when they create projects and write papers.

They even read mine and each other's from time to time because they want to know what other books might interest them.

Plus the notebooks are interactive. When I do "checks" I always write comments. They know I will bring up what they wrote when I conference with them. I even have kids who pat their notebooks at the end of class and say, "I bet you can't wait to read what I wrote this time!"

Using reader's notebooks rather than logs or summary sheets has helped my students to make the jump from just rehashing what they read to actually thinking about it, analyzing it, and evaluating it. My students are reading and writing every single day, and best of all it's about books and topics they have chosen and are invested in.

Of course I still have a few students who moan and groan about reading and writing; they don't want to because it's hard or it's "boring". But it's only February. In the next four months, I bet I convert them because once they find The Book that excites them, they will be dying to talk about it both in person and in their notebooks.

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Using Reader's Notebooks in Middle School

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I've been approached by many teachers who ask me, if you don't use reading logs to monitor how... Click To Tweet According to experts like Penny Kittle, Donalyn Miller, and Kelly Gallagher, giving students choice in what they read is paramount in getting kids to read more and to read better.

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The reader's notebook is an integral part of reading workshop and is a great tool for authentic assessment. It goes hand-in-hand with read-aloud with accountable talk and will really be powerful if students learn to talk deeply in preparation for writing.

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Lucy Calkins and Colleagues Units of Study

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Units of Study for Teaching Reading Grades 6-8

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Units of Study in Reading A Workshop Curriculum for Middle School Grades. Meet the needs of middle-grade readers. Essentials of Reading Instruction.

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Partnerships Discuss Different Characters in a Text

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Partnerships Discuss Different Characters in a Text

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Partners Discuss the Different Perspectives of Characters in a Text (5-8)

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Lucy Calkins and Colleagues at the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project present Partners Discuss the Different Perspectives of Characters in a Text (5-8)

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Whole Class Instruction...Perspective and Point of View

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Whole Class Instruction...Perspective and Point of View

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Whole Class Instruction in Perspective and Point of View (5-8)

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Lucy Calkins and Colleagues at the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project present Whole Class Instruction in Perspective and Point of View (5-8)

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Using a Learning Progression to Support Self Assessment and Writing about Themes in Literature

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Using a Learning Progression to Support Self Assessment and Writing about Themes in Literature

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Using a Learning Progression to Support Self-Assessment and Writing about Themes in Literature: Small Group Work (3-5)

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Lucy Calkins and Colleagues at the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project present Using a Learning Progression to Support Self-Assessment and Writing about Themes in Literature: Small Group (3-5)

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Small Group Conversation of Students Tracing a Theme

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Small Group Conversation of Students Tracing a Theme

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Watch a Small Group Conversation to See Students Tracing a Theme Across and Within Bud, Not Buddy and Tiger Rising (3-5)

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Lucy Calkins and Colleagues at the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project present Watch a Small Group Conversation to See Students Tracing a Theme Across and Within Bud, Not Buddy and Tiger Rising (3-5)

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A Reading Conference: Teaching Intertextuality to a Student (5-8)

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Lucy Calkins and Colleagues at the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project present A Reading Conference: Teaching Intertextuality to a Student (5-8)

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Introducing a Class to a Text-based Debate

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Introducing a Class to a Text-based Debate

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Introducing a Class to Text-based Debate (3-5)

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Lucy Calkins and Colleagues at the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project present Introducing a Class to Text-based Debate (3-5)

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By looking at the quarter 1 bend document for the 7th grade , I identified AKS that were not explicitly taught during the writing unit and included them on the standards to address in the reading unit. The standards listed here also include AKS 7th grade students will see on the Quarter 1 interim.

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Get access to files anywhere through secure cloud storage and file backup for your photos, videos, files and more with Google Drive.

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Unit Outline for a Hypothetical Q1 7LA Reading Workshop

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Unit Outline for a Hypothetical Q1 7LA Reading Workshop

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This unit would consist of three bends, with four set sessions and a flex day in each bend. The flex days would leave time for independent reading, conferring, small group remediation, etc. Students and teachers would maintain Readers’ Notebooks to track their thinking across the texts that they ...

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Session 1: Examining What the Text Says and What a Reader Infers STANDARDS FOR SESSION 1 AKS 1: cite several pieces of textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text  MATERIALS FOR SESSION 1 Students will need their Reader’s No...

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You will want to give students choice in their reading. At the same time, it will be a good idea to use some touchstone texts so that you can have some common conversations at various points during the sessions. Having some touchstone texts in common will also be helpful during your minilessons and teacher read aloud/think aloud sessions.

For this  purpose, you might consider using short stories, poems, and excerpts (when you consider literary texts). In looking at the 7th grade textbook, a story such as The White Umbrella (Gish Jen) or The Scholarship Jacket (Marta Salinas) might be paired up with Cisneros' Bums in the Attic from The House on Mango Street. These three texts have some thematic similarities, but they could be anchors for teaching different skills.

Also, in terms of literary non-fiction, Dirk the Protector would also be thematically connected to the selections above, and teachers could pull articles on childhood homelessness, on poverty, and other issues that would relate to the fiction and non-fiction anchors during the Reading Like a Researcher sessions.

Ultimately, you will want to tie the sessions together in a way that your students can follow and engage with in terms of interest. They can read independent choices simultaneously both in class and for homework as they practice the skills of your sessions.

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This is a text you might pull in as one of your anchor texts to use during read aloud/minilessons.

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Why should teachers review the Q1 bend documents before planning AKS for the reading unit?

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Why should teachers review the Q1 bend documents before planning AKS for the reading unit?

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If you are creating a reading unit that will follow your first UoS writing unit, pay attention to the last row of the document where AKS that were not covered in Writing Unit 1 are listed. Begin here with planning for a quarter 1 reading unit to ensure all AKS for the quarter are covered in instruction.

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Another text you might consider using to anchor the unit when you cover literary skills...

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A poem you might use...

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This is a literary non-fiction piece that might be used as an anchor text.