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Reading clubs provide opportunities for students to orchestrate all of their reading skills and strategies for authentic reading purposes and to develop the kinds of reading habits that will likely encourage a lifelong realationship to reading.
 * __Reading Clubs__**

__Essential Questions:__

How are your reading clubs going? How are they supporting comprehension? What questions do you have about managment and organization?

Please add your comments and questions on this page for all to review. Thanks

I am only 3 or 4 lessons into Reading Clubs and just want to add a brief comment. The children reading in clubs at the higher levels did a terrific job sampling the available book choices, discussing the books and choosing books together. I did find today that the groups in the lower range had a very difficult time staying on task during independent work time. Did anyone else notice this? Does anyone have any suggestions on keeping these groups on task while working with other groups? Can it be one big reading club with 5 children in it? Should they work within their clubs at the same table? Since the book choices for the lower groups had very short texts, we allowed the children to choose 2 titles each, rather than one. I am also excited to say that many of the children were eager to begin reading in their reading clubs. Also, Elizabeth and I dedicated about 75% of the workshop to reading clubs and had the children read independently for the rest of the period. Should it be done another way? Also, I know it's not a great thing to have children write about their reading all of the time, but how can we keep the children accountable for their talk? How does a culminating project (something really cool) at the end of the unit sound? Any ideas? Also, I am normally not a huge fan of directly giving students dialogue to have the conversation, only because I feel that it becomes rehearsed and in turn not authentic talk. But, is that the only way to encourage the talk aside from modeling and practice? Should we create prompt charts (in case they do not know how to get started)? Or conversation topics (things that can be discussed during a book club)? Should we get a wiki going to encourage students across the classes to discuss what they are doing in their clubs? Also, can we use the camera to video an awesome discussion among students and use that to model reading clubs to other teachers and students? Sorry there is so much here, I just figured I'd get it going. How is it going for eveyone else? - **Jennifer** Sounds like it's going great. As Amy said to me, "It's messy and loud", but my visits to her classroom indicated students were on talk, talking about the books. Baby steps..... You bring up a lot of good question, which I think we should discuss as a group after we have more time to observe. Amy has a flip camera and is videotaping the talk. Other might want to do the same so that we can bring it to the group for discussion. I'll try to do some research and maybe invite Kathy Collins to join our wikki. She may be able to bring in even more insight. You never know until you ask. Keep up the good work. I know Art, Kerri, and Jennifer are going to plan on Thursday. Should spec. ed. teachers to be a part of the planning, too? I would love to be a part of this conversation. My (much lower kids) are choosing several books about the same characters to discuss and get to know. Is this okay? Jennifer and I were talking about the strategy lessons from Chapter 4. Maybe we should revisit those to focus some more on partnerships and accountable talk, since that seems to be at the root of the problem. What do you think? -Elizabeth

3/19/09 Jennifer and I made up cue cards to help the partners keep their ideas afloat. So far, they have been really helping. We are thinking of adding visual icons for the kids that aren't able to read the words. We uploaded it onto the RESOURCES page. -Elizabeth and Jennifer