Reading Workshop

You can’t teach what you don’t know, so anyone who doesn’t know how to enjoy reading literature, thinking about it, and entering into dialogues about it shouldn’t try to teach those pleasures to others.                                                                                      Perry Nodelman Teachers can’t just read about web-based and digital resources, they have to begin exploring these resources for themselves. Teachers also need to begin thinking about how these resources might be used in their reading workshops. To help teachers move forward into the digital age, they need to be given time to explore a wide range of digital resources, time to talk with other teachers about how they have been using these resources in their classrooms, time to play arou...

In this lovely, irreverent story about a gorilla and a jackass, the divide between the digital generation and book lovers is explored in great humor. In typical Lane Smith fashion, readers are offered a look at things from a slightly different point of view. One of my favorite books to use during professional development workshops on Reading Workshop 2.0.

This dark picturebook from Helen Ward and Marc Craste is an allegory for urban plight and the challenges of environment protection. The award winning illustrations are subtlety rendered in dark hues and set the mood for the narrative. This book mends me of Marsden and Tan's book The Rabbits. Excellent!

Shaun Tan's new book Rules of Summer reminds me of every summer vacation with the other boys in my neighborhood. The book is a bout two brothers, but since I never had a brother my memories were drawn to the rules my friends and I made up every summer about crazy things. This delightfully illustrated book (all of Shaun's are) takes the reader back to summertime and shares with them the exploits of sibling rivalry and brotherly love.

Here is an excerpt from my upcoming book: Reading Workshop 2.0: Teaching Reading in the Digital Age about commenting on texts (coding and marking up) with digital apps. Commenting Using Apps on Mobile Devices             In addition to online, computer, and browser based programs, there are numerous apps available for mobile devices like smartphones and tablets that allow readers to highlight, comment on, and aggregate a variety of digital texts, including books, PDFs, images, and webpages. In general, these apps allow readers to import a text, highlight specific sections, type or handwrite notes in the margins, aggregate these highlights and notes, and share highlights and notes with other readers online.             For the past few years, I have been trying out a variety of note-taking apps and have found Goodreader.com , Notes Plus , and Penultimate to be the easiest apps f...

For many years, my students in both elementary and college classes have asked me about what to put on their post-its, how many post-its are required for each book, and what are they expected to do with them when they are finished reading. These are all logical questions, but they also reveal that students were not using the post-its for their own purposes, but were simply following directions to complete an assignment. As a reader, I don’t comment on texts or write in margins to complete an assignment. Rather, I highlight or code texts, write comments, and share these comments to help me make sense of and analyze the texts I read. Until our students understand the purposes behind these coding and commenting practices, they will simply complete the assignments we require of them and fill their books with useless post-its. Coding texts is simply a form of highlighting and commenting. When I have asked students to code texts in preparation for their literature discussions, I sugge...

A Reading Workshop 2.0 environment is designed to provide teachers and students with digital and web-based resources and technologies for reading, sharing, discussing, and analyzing children’s literature. These resources provide new avenues for breaking away from traditional ways of responding to one’s reading and new tools for accessing, sharing, analyzing and discussing what is being read. As readers encounter children’s literature in new formats and platforms, the basic processes of reading, sharing, discussing and analyzing texts will change in some ways and remain the same in others. Because of these changes, new instructional approaches and resources will be required to support the development of young readers in a Reading Workshop 2.0 environment. In the second half of this book I will share specific instructional approaches and lesson ideas that take into account how digital and web-based resources impact reading, sharing, discussing and analyzing children’s literature. Altho...