This is it my friends! Back to school time for me. Tomorrow is my first teacher work day. This summer went by way too fast! This year I’ll be doing the reading thing again. I loved focusing on reading all day with the different age age groups. Even though I love my new job, I still miss the classroom. It’s just not the same in September. When I taught 1st grade for all those years, my favorite part of the day was my beloved Reading Workshop time. It took me the first couple years to figure out what works for me. Once I did, it was SO nice! I tried to do just centers. Then I tried to do just Daily 5. I loved both… so that’s what I decided to do- both!
Today I’m going to show you how I set up my reading block.
My reading workshop time is divided into three parts: Guided Reading, Daily 5, and literacy centers.
This is the chart I’ve used to let students know where they are supposed to be during reading workshop:
I have limited time for my Reading Workshop and not that many students, so 3 rotations worked me most of the time. I had a few years where I had 4 rotations. Here’s what that would look like:
I didn’t always have access to iPads, so during that 4th rotation, my students would do another round of Daily 5. As the year went on, I would give them special assignments during that 4th rotation. It would usually be a reader response type activity or seat work that may go with your school’s reading program.
To reduce the walking around, they all keep book boxes with them.
I hope this gives you some things to think about when deciding what your reading workshop will look like. If you love Daily 5 but also love some literacy centers, this set up may work for you. You still get to use whatever centers you love, but it’s nice to not have to worry about filling that WHOLE reading workshop time with centers. I don’t have any prep usually for the Daily 5 and the prep for centers is mostly done at the beginning of the month. My students love doing centers and they like that change each month.
