What a great week! The icing on the Teacher's College Institute cake was Jennifer Serravallo spending the day with us today. All 100+ of us in attendance received a copy of Serravallo's new book simply titled The Reading Strategies Book. It is fantastic and I highly recommend it for any elementary educator. After all, if you teach elementary, you teach reading. The book is available on Amazon and is well worth the money!
Today, we learned about teaching reading workshop with The Reading Strategies Book as our go to resource. We watched videos of Jennifer Serravallo conferring with individual and small groups of students for what the students' strengths and discussed what we might teach next. Then, we used the book to identify strategies we could teach to match the goals we set. The work we did today was invaluable and will be meaningful and exciting development for grade level teams this year!
The work is a perfect follow up for the work that my coaching partner and I did this year with the teams of teachers in our building. We asked teachers to start thinking about individual reading goals for students through one of the lenses Serravallo refers to in her book: engagement, print work/decoding, fluency, comprehension (inc. plot/setting, characters, vocabulary/figurative language, or themes/ideas), and conversation. Today, Serravallo added emergent reading as a possibility for our youngest students and "writing about reading." I can't wait to share this work with my teams and have already convinced our administrators to purchase copies of the book for our teachers. We'll be putting this new learning and great resource to good use as we extend our learning on setting goals and planning instruction to match!
My takeaways from today:
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| order on amazon! |
The work is a perfect follow up for the work that my coaching partner and I did this year with the teams of teachers in our building. We asked teachers to start thinking about individual reading goals for students through one of the lenses Serravallo refers to in her book: engagement, print work/decoding, fluency, comprehension (inc. plot/setting, characters, vocabulary/figurative language, or themes/ideas), and conversation. Today, Serravallo added emergent reading as a possibility for our youngest students and "writing about reading." I can't wait to share this work with my teams and have already convinced our administrators to purchase copies of the book for our teachers. We'll be putting this new learning and great resource to good use as we extend our learning on setting goals and planning instruction to match!
My takeaways from today:
- Students won't grow as readers if they don't have time to read. Teach towards independence and give the gift of time.
- Be especially aware of independent reading time for those receiving interventions. Intervention should be in addition to, not in place of classroom reading instruction.
- Rescuing students in a conference does not lead to independence. Instead, start by prompting with the lowest scaffold and work your way up as needed.
- Nothing else matters if students are not engaged in reading! Serravallo offers many great strategies for increasing engagement in the book.
- The person doing the work is the person doing the learning.
- Match your instruction to the goal of the student.
Thanks, Jennifer, for a great day! We hope to see you again soon.
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