A Look Inside: Resource Reading-Management

Planning is complete!  Right?  Well, not-so-much!  Now that instruction is planned the next step is to set up and manage the instruction and instructional activities.  I think the best way for me to explain to you what my classroom looks like is to go through my schedule with you.

I have a resource reading group for grades 3, 4, and 5 for one hour.  It began with me having the kids for 40 minutes for reading and then at a later time having most of them back for 20 minutes for writing.  Then one day I had an epiphany!  If I combined both of these times it would be liking killing two birds with one stone!  I could service the students for reading and writing in one larger block of time and tie together reading and writing with my guided lessons and form literacy groups.

Perfect!  So, with little tweaking of the schedule I now have 9 kids for one hour for reading and writing.  While it is true that some of these friends do not have writing goals, they could still use the extra support in writing.  I make a point that my students with writing goals that when I meet with those students during teacher time that we address writing specific goals and they finish the writing center work for my monitoring purposes.

My schedule goes like this:

15 minutes-Whole group guided reading lesson
     (during this time the students are actively engaged with me and we are working on the reading strategy for the week and comprehension strategies)

15 minutes-Students go to their first rotation
Some will go to word work or the writing center, some will buddy read, and the others will go to the listening center.  All of this goes on while I pull one on one (or sometimes groups of 2 or 3) for direct instruction/intervention in their greatest area of need.  I work with them on fluency, basic reading strategies, Corrective Reading, or sight word recognition.

15 minutes-Students go to 2nd rotation
Again students do one of the three groups as stated above or they are coming to me.

10-15 minutes-Students will go to final rotation
This rotation often includes silent reading or read to self time.  By this rotation, students have finished the work that needs to be completed in the centers.  I may still be meeting with a few students to finish up one on one time.

The last 5 minutes is a wrap up time.  Students have a time to tell me what they have learned during that day and how they are doing on the target for the day/week.

Side Notes:  If a student finishes in a rotation before time is up, then the student may silent read, practice sight words silently, or reread their fluency passage for the week.
The student know which rotation they are going to do daily because it is programmed on their individual visual schedules that I posted about yesterday.

Each day my students are required to do fluency practice and work with teacher time.  The teacher time though is not necessarily a rotation, but instead happens as I call them over.
I am really enjoying the literacy stations so far.  This is giving my students some independence and making them responsible for their learning.  The students are engaged and doing work they enjoy.