Reading and Writing Workshop

This article was a good summary for me of the elements of readers and writers workshop. I noticed that they included shared reading and interative reading in the same heading.

I realized that I have already been doing write alouds and shared writing and independent writing in my science classes already. When we watch a United Streaming video, I ask the students to take one bulleted note for each 2 minutes of video (independent writing). After the video is finished I ask students to share their best notes with the rest of the class so that other students who may have missed something (or are just not proficient at watching a video and taking notes at the same time) have a compolete set of notes. As students share, I type their notes on the smartboard for all students to copy. This helps me ensure they have notes for all of the salient point on the video, and that they have a chance to review what they have learned. We work together on the grammar, spelling and semantics of the bulleted notes as I type them on the board. I even occasionallyt have student volunteers check a dictionary to make sure we are spelling things correctly.