Workshop Review

Person(s) attending: Karen Abbott, Amy Kieran, Deb Sampson - Pond Cove teachers

Date: March 30, 2007

Name of Workshop/Conference: It’s Got to Make Sense: Comprehension Instruction Across the Grades

Presenter(s): Sharon Taberski

Ideas I brought back for my classroom and to share with others:

• Great conference! One of the overall themes was that Balanced Literacy is a menu, not a checklist. Sharon Taberski kept returning to this throughout the presentation. There were many ideas pertinent to K-4, but here are a few we’re going to focus on.

Spend more time building background knowledge prior to reading. We tend to shorten this so we can get to the text, but she reminded us to engage children in conversation around it because they need opportunities to ask questions and wonder.

Incorporate individual reading conferences into the literacy block. During individual reading conferences, you consult about book choices, strategies they are successful with or need to work on, Running Records, etc. This may be challenging with reading groups so important in 1st grade. However, this could be done in the spring as the children become more independent readers.

She introduced the concept of ‘companion texts’ of which we have a few in our bookroom. There are two texts grouped by topic/theme, genre, series, or by strategy. The text for the reading group would be the more difficult (usually non-fiction) and the other would be for independent reading in browsing bags. . This would be great summer work for our team’s bookroom and for individual classroom reading group books.

Create a strategy board that highlights strategies such as ‘think about text structure’, ‘summarize to find what’s important’, and ‘visualizing to understand’ the children work on during quiet reading. Children share their book and strategy at the end. This can easily be modified for any grade level.

Try leveling classroom books by stage (emergent, early, transitional, etc.) then by level within the stage.

Use walkmans for ELL and lower readers to build comprehension and fluency skills. Have them listen to a story on tape several times to help them read it independently and fluently and retell successfully.

Sharon also gave us ideas for ‘strategy pages’, editing checklists, response journals for individual conferences, and ways to help children learn to synthesize text.