Reader's Workshop Weekly Roundup: Week Five

Wow. Half way through the term already. We had a busy, busy week this week. We delved into thinking about the main idea, our own background knowledge and how to condense a plot into 5 words :) Reading buddies worked really well here, as students tried to summarise their whole plots!

The individual reading is going well in the classroom, spurred on by my own reading from last weekend (I read 6 books, including the latter three Percy Jackson books). Smile by Raina Telgemeier was a massive new inclusion to the classroom library, with the girls all begging to be next to read it, and one girl immediately rereading it. (BTW I highly recommend it - I absolutely loved it). The Grade 7s are also working their way through Juggling with Mandarins (published as Out of Reach in the US) by V. M. Jones. I'm setting one book a term as a compulsory read for them, though there's no worksheets or vocabulary, just discussion to follow. The Grade 6s and 5s just want the Grade 7s to finish so they can read the book too.

Unfortunately, we're required to run full practice NAPLAN tests next week. So we spent some time renaming it 'You Know What' and 'That which must not be named' before a quick run through what the testers are looking for. We came up with a routine which involved reading it through 'in the zone', then rereading again looking for the 'Three Fs' - important Facts, Figurative language, and Finding similar words. We'll look at this more clearly before the real test - really point out how much of a different genre the test is.

Finally we had a fun Friday when I premiered my first book trailer (for The 6th Grade Nickname Game by Gordon Korman, which I placed in my classroom library after the trailer aired. It stayed on the shelf for, oh, well about 2 minutes). The kids really enjoyed the trailer, and when we went down to the computer lab, they all had a go at making their own using Movie Maker and Paint.net (I wish we had a better graphics program at our school). One, for Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief, was particularly effective and I jumped when Medusa appeared on the screen.

On Friday we also finished our first read-aloud of the year. Parvana (also known as Breadwinner) by Deborah Ellis, was a huge hit with the class, even if they didn't all enjoy it at the start. A lot of them are asking about the sequals which are in our school library. On Tuesday (I'm out of the class Monday), we'll begin to read Anything but Typical by Nora Raleigh Baskin, which I quickly previewed yesterday.

To top off this huge week of reading, we added a new poster to our classroom door which has been a talking point to my students and any who go by. It shows how many books the students have read since the beginning of the school year (153), how many I have read (54) and what some of our favourites are - our little way of spreading the reading bug to others around us :)