 Dear Friends, For the last couple of weeks I have been making something for you. Inspired by my son's pen pal relationship this summer, I ordered every book I could find that involved characters who write letters. I read them all carefully, considering how some could work together around the theme, Mail Myself to You. Finally, I wrote a set of K-5 lessons--including Reading Art, Read Aloud, Shared Reading, Small Group Instruction, and Independent Reading. I've assembled these lessons in a tabbed hyperdoc--a pdf that links to sections within the document, as well as to sources outside the document. It includes videos of me describing the books and the lessons, written descriptions of each lesson, and ideas for extension. The lessons are clustered: kindergarten-1st, 2nd-3rd, and 4th-5th. The lessons are free, with a subscription to my blog/newsletter. If you complete the contact form below, I will email you personally, including the 25-page, linked PDF as an attachment (Please, give me 24 hours to respond). Or, if you want to write to me directly to request the document, my email is tct.jan@gmail.com. I am excited to share this collection of resources with you. They have been a labor of love. Wishing you all good things, Jan
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 I recently had lunch with my dear mentor and she told me a story about working in a classroom and sitting with a first grade student who was just beginning to read. She asked him to share his independent reading book with her only to discover that it was much too hard for him to read on his own. They went together to the classroom library, which was beautifully organized by topic and areas of interest to the students. As it turned out, however, there was literally nothing in the classroom library that the reader could actually decode independently.
As you are assembling and organizing your classroom library consider the quality, the accessibility, and reading level of what is available to students. As Kim Yaris and I describe in Reading Wellness, at any given time students will be reading more than one text. For beginning readers, that should include variety in terms of difficulty. A single reader may have one or more picture books, which he or she may read by looking at the pictures and telling the story. Hopefully, he or she will also have some high-quality, controlled-vocabulary texts--decodable and/or patterned--to engage in the practice of decoding and constructing meaning. |
AuthorDr. Jan Burkins is a full-time writer, consultant, and professional development provider. Archives
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