Reader's+Workshop

The premise of Reader's Workshop is to equip students with a better understanding of "how" they actually read. I will reteach the strategies of reading along with the five areas of balanced literacy (Fluency, Phonics, Phoneme Awareness, Reading Comprehension, & Vocabulary) to give the kids a well-rounded reading experience.
 * Reader's Workshop**:

You may have heard such words as "schema", "metacognition", "visualization" from y﻿our first graders last year? These are a few of our reading strategies that we teach. I want you to know that I use these strategies as a tool, much as I would use certain manipulatives to teach Math. Not ALL manipulatives work in the same way for all children, so I am very mindful that these Reading Strategies do not work in the same way for everyone. We will be working through all of these strategies again this year, but please be sure that your child will receive equal lessons in grammar, spelling, story structures, & the five areas of balanced-literacy. I am providing a list of the Reading Strategies along with a link to explain the strategies that may seem obscure.

__**Metacognition**__ (Thinking about your thinking) [|Metacognition]

__**Schema**__ (Background knowledge) [|Schema]

__**Connections**__ (text-to-self; text-to-text; text-to-world) [|Making Connections]

__**Questioning**__ ("Huh?", "What did I just read?", "That didn't make sense...") I couldn't find a sufficient link that explains this strategy to parents. Essentially we are teaching students to be aware the moments while they are reading and a big ? appears in their head. With this strategy we practice rereading, reading further, and using context clues for better understanding.

__**Inferring**__ (Reading between the lines; understanding the unwritten words) [|Inferring]

__**Visualization**__ (Using your sense to see, feel, hear, taste, and smell what you read) In my opinion, the best part of reading! This is what allows us to "escape" to other times and places through the words we read. I also feel as though this is the strategy we really need to focus on because children are quickly becoming accustomed to having a live feed into the world around us through television and gaming - very little is left to the imagination. We will focus on being aware of "Our Mind's Eye" this year - the things we have to see, hear, feel, taste, & smell in our minds in order to experience things that are not immediately in front of us.

__**Determining Importance**__ - one of the hardest concepts for 7 & 8 year-olds - EVERYTHING'S IMPORTANT! We will work diligently to sift through the words give meaning to what we read and the words that are background.

__**Synthesizing**__ - This is simply putting it all together; when we can use all seven strategies together while we read. It's sort of like studying grammar rules of English - it's rules we use everyday when we speak our given language, but when we actually sit down and dissect the rules it gives us a better understanding of why English Language Learners have such a difficult time learning what we do naturally.