I spend a lot of time planning. Not just for my classroom. I’m a planner by nature. I’m constantly spending time planning future trips or activities to do with my kids and family. I’m not sure I’d function properly without a life planner/daily calendar. I’ve spent a lot of time reading and thinking about my classroom for next school year.
Originally I was planning whole class novels and short stories to set my class up pretty similarly to what it was like this past year. I read Whole Novels for the Whole Class by Ariel Sacks and really loved it. I will definitely be adopting some of her strategies for my class this year. At that point (sometime during spring semester) I was still planning on doing several whole class novels throughout the school year because I do see the value in having a common text to build community and have a text to refer to as a class. My biggest concern at that point was reaching some of my least engaged students. I have several that are just so done with school and struggle so much that they don’t care. I did my very best to choose interesting texts last year, and they did successfully engage some or even most of my students. But not all. I’m looking for something to reach those kids that just don’t want to be engaged (or think they don’t). I’ll post more about my specific group of students in another post.
I loved so many of Ariel Sacks’s ideas from WNFTWC, but I still was struggling with trying to select texts that would engage all of my students. Then I read The Book Whisperer by Donalyn Miller, and I LOVED the idea but I was skeptical at first that it would work with my students. I was so in the mindset that I needed to catch my students who were trying to fake read that I wasn’t thinking that my job is to convince them that reading is valuable and to stop fake reading in the first place. After a lot of reading and research on Miller’s strategies, I decided to really commit to it for this next school year. I next read Penny Kittle’s Book Love and got even more excited about a free choice reading focus in my classroom. I’m still in the very beginning of this, but I’m so excited to see how it changes my students and how they view reading.
My goals for my English resource class for 2015-16:
- Be EXCITED about reading and talk about it daily. Emphasize FREE CHOICE in reading. I don’t care what books they choose as long as they are reading daily.
- Book talk daily. I know this may not always happen, but it’s going to be a priority.
- Independent reading time every single day. I know it’ll be tempting to cut reading time if we are short on time, but I’m going to do my best not to. One thing I’m doing to try to keep it the focus daily is to having reading time be the first 15 minutes of every class every day. I will also have to commit to enforce that reading time is for reading! Not whispering to your neighbor, not finishing homework for your next class, not going to the bathroom or going next door to ask your last teacher if you forgot your jacket in there. I will show my students that reading time is important in our classroom.
- Reading conferences at least once a week with each individual student to talk about their reading.
- Using interesting mentor texts to teach reading skills.
- Having a class read aloud novel or a daily poem to use as a community text. Incorporate as much class choice as possible when selecting these.
- More of a writing focus. So many of my students struggle with writing and honestly I was overwhelmed at how much work we needed to do last year to improve writing, so while I tried, I didn’t try hard enough. I’ll be incorporating writing days each week and have found so much good information and strategies in Gretchen Bernabei’s books/website. I look forward to using her ideas with my students. I think it will help improve all of their writing.
- Incorporating Article of the Week. I read about Kelly Gallagher’s Article of the Week last year and thought it was such a great idea. Nonfiction is something my students usually resist, but having interesting current event articles in our weekly plan is something I want to start. Hopefully lots of good discussion and improved nonfiction reading/writing skills will result.
I plan to post a lot more about these ideas in detail, but this is an overview of my thoughts and plans for next year. I’m excited to see how it benefits my students.
Resources I mention in this post:
Ariel Sacks
Donalyn Miller
Penny Kittle
Gretchen Bernabei
Article of the Week
Reading in Mrs. Lay's Room 