Bring the Best of the Science of Reading into Your Reading Workshop: Integrating Decodable Texts, Phonological Awareness, Orthographic Mapping, and Knowledge Building into Your Reading Workshop

Date: Tuesday, August 27, 2024

Time: 11:00 AM - 3:00 PM ET

Location: Online, via Zoom

Who Should Attend: Grades K-2 teachers and coaches

Cost: $150 per person

Teachers who have seen the new K-2 Units of Study in Reading are saying, “This has far more science of reading than what we’re seeing in the core reading programs!”  The new Units of Study can go a long way towards helping you rebalance your teaching, bringing in decodable texts and more support for kids to apply their phonics knowledge as they read and write. Still, these changes can create a lot of disequilibrium for teachers. This day is designed to help.

Because the ground on which you stand has been shifting over the past few years, routines and organizational structures that once worked fairly well may no longer feel adequate. We’ll therefore provide new and helpful advice for establishing routines and organizational structures to support kid’s engagement and progress. In particular, we will help you consider options for your schedules, your classroom libraries, your assessments, your small groups, and your record keeping.  

Part of the day will be designed to help you get your head around the new curriculum. We’ll explain the decisions that informed the curriculum, highlight important resources you may not have seen, and help you use curricular maps, scope and sequence documents, text-dependent questions and other online resources that can be enormously helpful. Finally, we’ll help you talk to parents about your instruction, anticipating questions you may be asked to address and helping you feel ready to answer them.

Across this day, expect to:

• Be brought behind the scenes to understand the ways the science of reading has been integrated into the new units, learning about decoding assessments, decodable texts, and more.

• Hear the relationship between the Units of Study and all the components of the Reading Rope.   

• Share classroom organization methods for classroom libraries, book bins/baggies, and partnerships.

• Think about routines you have in place for whole group, small group and individual work–and for transitions between these–so that your teaching can be more streamlined. You’ll be reminded of tricks, such as channeling kids to set up for work before the minilesson and using songs as ways to end and start work. Solid transitions can have a huge impact on student engagement right from the start.

• Hear how some teachers use a variety of workspaces to provide different children with the different structures they seem to need. 

• Hear about structures you can build into your reading workshop that encourage kids to become more independent in their work, including rereading for many purposes and using book mats and charts to support their executive function.

• Develop a repertoire of coaching prompts and questions to guide students towards autonomous goal-setting around volume, stamina and independence.

• Find ways to lean on mid-workshop teaching points and partnerships to teach independence. 

• Rethink how you partner students, and hear about ways to help partners work with increased independence. And we’ll share three kinds of reading-together partnerships that have special power–echo partners, turn-taking partners and copy-cat partners–and we will invite you to consider the strength of bringing these partnerships across your curriculum.