Kindergarten Reading Workshop Day 1...

Since one of my main goals with the kids this year was to spend a lot more time reading and learning about reading I knew I wanted to include my two kindergartners in on that as well. I've decided to do a reading mini-lesson with them as well while the big kids are having their silent reading time.

It has been a long time since I have done or read about mini-lessons for kindergartners. I had some last minute planning panic as I sat down to actually plan mini-lessons for the first week. What should I teach my non-readers?  My master plan also included them having silent reading time on their own as well, so next I panicked if I would in the real world (as opposed to my favorite world- picture perfect planning family) be able to get them to sit and read quietly when they don't know how to read???

When I read up on the Daily 5 and from hanging out with my teacher friends, I knew that they had to build "reading stamina" so I would work them into reading a little longer each day. As I tried to picture what that time would look like a good reading instruction term popped into my head and mini-lesson #1 was born.

So, today I had them sit on the carpet and I very dramatically told them I had a book for them that they had never read before. I had the book turned around and told them when I turned it over they had to use their best reading thinking and make some predictions as to what it was about.

They were part of the opening Reading Workshop Lesson I did with all the kids where I read them Patricia Polacco's Aunt Chip and the Great Triple Creek Dam Affair. I reminded them how we learned in that book that "Books hold treasures and the key to unlocking the treasure is reading". Then I dramatically explained to them that this was their kindergarten year which meant that they were going to get the key to the treasure- learning to read. However, they don't have it yet so today we were going to learn one way to read which was reading by the pictures.

I turned the book over. It was If You Take a Mouse to School (I'd like to tell you I researched the perfect book for this lesson but really at the last minute I grabbed the first book I could find that I hadn't read to them yet. It was PERFECT!). They have read If You Give A Mouse a Cookie which worked out beautifully because they understood the flow of the story and were better able to make good predictions based on the pictures.

I told them we were going to "picture walk" through the book, and they were to tell me what happens by looking at the pictures. Then I literally made my two fingers walk across the book as we turned each page. They LOVED it!

After all their great predictions we read the book and talked about how well they predicted what would happen. Then I got my timer out and explained that now they GOT to go read quietly on their own. I showed them the timer and we counted out 4 minutes together. I laid out all the other books in that series and told them they could choose one of them or another book from their shelf.

Interestingly, Will grabbed three books but actually spent the entire time rereading the one we had done together. He's my very active child, but if you get him to buy into an activity there is none better. Well, I must have sold this well because he took his books to his table and didn't look up until the timer went off!

Wesley, God bless him, is going to struggle with the silent part of silent reading! He's my chatty kid. Well, one of two I should say (Big sister was in her room reading!). In his defense, he was sitting close to me and was just telling me about the book so it was good!

They read perfectly for 4 minutes today, and we will try 5 tomorrow. At the dinner table when they had to tell Daddy what they learned and what their favorite thing was they both answered "Picture Walking" for both so I'm counting Reading Workshop Day 1 as a complete success!