Book Club Plus connections to classroom

In my classroom, we take part in a lot of literacy activities. We focus on literacy because it is used in every aspect of our teaching and curriculum including mathematics, science and social studies. We also have not started every part of literacy teaching that we do yet because the children are not yet ready to begin or we  have not figured out what level these children are at academically yet. In many aspects, our literacy program is very close to the book club plus model. In the book club plus model. We do take part in some community share however we do not call it this. We have mini lessons that take place in our classroom that have to do with reading and writing. We also have read – a- loud’s that take place. Also, we have writers workshop as well as readers workshop. We are still establishing readers workshop as well as literacy centers which is called Daily Five. Because I am in a kindergarten classroom, my students are not yet reading on their own so we are taking our time setting up our literacy centers with reading to self, read to a partner and listening on tape. We also do not have book clubs where children talk to each other about a book they are reading because we are not at that point. Conversations about books though would be discussed in guided reading later on throughout the year.

               On page 15, the four curricular areas are “comprehension, writing, language conventions, and literary aspects.” These four areas are represented in other ways throughout our curriculum. This would include our “Making Meaning” curriculum which is our comprehension section where one book is focused on each week and you work with partners and ask children questions regarding the book of the week. Each week there is a new theme. On page 30, three comprehension principles are discussed which include “comprehension instruction should be explicit, comprehension strategies must be modeled by more knowledgeable others, including teachers and peers, and comprehension strategies must be scaffolded by the teacher until students are able to apply the strategies successfully during independent reading and response to reading. “ These principles are modeled in our classroom through modeling done by my teacher and I. We also teach specific strategies and we do one teaching point at a time so that students are not being overwhelmed by too much information at one time. We also use shared reading in order to teach concepts of print which is something for students to understand in order to start reading their own books. In a lot of ways, the program emphasized in my classroom is very similar to the book club plus model, however there are different names in place.

               So far in my classroom, I have not seen writing into a unit, or writing out of a unit. At this point in the school year we have mainly focused on trying to make connections with the story we are reading together. We have so far not had children writing on their own about something we have talked about. We may have shared information verbally which is still a part of literacy, however students has not done this on their own yet. This may be something that we start doing later on throughout the year.