Launch an Intermediate Reading Workshop: Getting Started with Units of Study for Teaching Reading, Grades 3-5

Workshops are deliberately kept simple and predictable, like an art studio or a researcher s laboratory, because it is the work itself that is ever changing and complex....Each day s teaching in a workshop does not set up a new hoop for the students to all jump through in sync. Instead, for the bulk of time during each day, students carry on with their work. As they do so, they draw upon a growing repertoire of skills, tools, strategies, and habit.
Lucy Calkins

Learn how to teach students to read with increasing sophistication and personal engagement and how Lucy Calkins and her colleagues launch a rigorous and responsive intermediate reading workshop. Through 2 foundational books A Guide to the Reading Workshop and Building a Reading Life and eight online video clips, Lucy and her colleagues provide the strategies, lesson plans, and tools you ll need to lead strong, efficient reading workshops in upper-elementary classrooms.

A Guide to the Reading Workshop crystallizes the reading workshop. After detailing the essential principles of reading workshop instruction, Lucy describes how to develop engaging minilessons that develop the skills of proficient readers. In the chapters that follow, Lucy presents different ways to lead small-group work and one-to-one conferences. In addition to describing the predictable methods and structures of a reading workshop, select chapters consider various ways to assess readers and track their development, how to use data to inform your instruction, and how to differentiate instruction and prepare for standardized reading tests.

Building a Reading Life launches the reading workshop. Lucy and Kathleen Tolan pull out all stops in an effort to help all their students become avid readers. They wear a love of reading on their own sleeves, help students fashion their identities as people who care about reading, and create a social life that revolves around shared books; above all, they help students develop a sense of agency about their reading lives, taking responsibility for becoming the kinds of readers who not only make sense of books but also let books change their lives. Lucy and Kathleen meanwhile induct children into the structures, routines, and habits of a reading workshop. Students learn how to choose books that are just right in level and interest, to carry books between home and school, to collect and study data about their reading rates and volume, and to push themselves to read with increasing stamina, fluency, and volume. In reading partnerships, children learn to retell and summarize texts and to share ideas that are grounded in the specifics of their books.

Through the eight accompanying video clips Lucy and other master teachers invite you to eavesdrop on their minilessons, small-group instruction, and conferences. Dramatic video clips let you sit alongside young readers as they engage in book clubs, reading partnerships, and inquiry groups.