I strongly agree that Fountas & Pinnell's Guiding Readers and Writers Grades 3-6 is a great place to start. Over the past year I've been heavily researching the area of reading and found F&P's book to be straight forward and VERY helpful. It is a big book but I like that it is divided into sections for each balanced literacy component and doesn't have to be read from cover to cover to be prove beneficial. I would say my biggest success has been implementing the first 20 days of reading workshop (although I didn't use all of the lessons and modified some to suit my needs). Because of the initial minilessons outlined in the book, my third graders cherish their independent reading time and take it quite seriously. No one is up roaming the room "looking for a book" or just hanging out wasting time.
I've also used the book Strategies That Work to help me become more familiar with the comprehension strategies and what books to use when teaching a specific strategy. As an FYI - http://reading.ecb.org is a great website for teachers and students to explore when teaching/learning the comprehension strategies. Whitney Hamilton, Third Grade Kit Carson Elementary 450 Tates Creek Road Richmond, KY 40475 [email protected] 859-624-4525 -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] on behalf of [email protected] Sent: Mon 1/26/2009 8:11 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [MOSAIC] professional readings It is a K-5 >> school that up till now has used a scripted basal program with a workbook. The books folks are recommending are ALL terrific.?? If people are starting at ground zero, moving from a scripted program, I'm wondering about many other things...basic things, like... do they have classroom libraries? independent reading? do they have "schema" for leveled text, differentiated instruction and what a 90 minute/literacy block might look like? When we first started moving away from HM as a core basal, we helped folks get going by starting with independent reading and classroom libraries.? We worked on conferring, choice, getting kids to understand what a just right book felt like (since everyone was always reading the same text, this was new to them!)? For the intermediate levels, we found Fountas/Pinnell's Guiding Readers and Writers Gr. 3-6 a great place for folks to get started.? It models, for example, the 'first 20 days' for launching independent reading.? It supports getting started with reading and writing workshops.? For the little ones, we loved Debbie Miller and her videos. Don't get me wrong - I love Harvey/Goudvis, Tony Stead and the rest of the great comprehension strategy people.? But F & P helped lay the ground work we built on. Search the MOSAIC archives at http://snipurl.com/MosaicArchive. _______________________________________________ Mosaic mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe or modify your membership please go to http://literacyworkshop.org/mailman/options/mosaic_literacyworkshop.org. Search the MOSAIC archives at http://snipurl.com/MosaicArchive. _______________________________________________ Mosaic mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe or modify your membership please go to http://literacyworkshop.org/mailman/options/mosaic_literacyworkshop.org. Search the MOSAIC archives at http://snipurl.com/MosaicArchive.
