Juli Kendall's Weekly
Reading Workshop Journal
A MiddleWeb Listserv Project
Self-selected members of the MiddleWeb Discussion List are joining
together to explore the Reading Workshop and other ideas about supporting
young adolescent readers. Juli Kendall, a reading teacher/coach in Long
Beach, California, is helping moderate the discussion. Juli is also keeping
a weekly journal of her own Reading Workshop initiative. Find out more about
our project at our Reading Workshop homepage.
You'll find Juli's background article here.
Links to many of the tools created by Juli and her colleagues are embedded
in these journals. Most often, when you click on them, a PDF file will begin
to download. You'll find a list of the downloads here.
Week #12
Introducing Series and
Early Chapter Books
"When do we get to read chapter books? How long will it take?"
-- Lament of the Middle School Prep class
At the beginning of the year, this is what we heard all the time. Kids were
anxious to read "real" chapter books. They were tired of thin,
easy text. But we needed time for them to learn that reading without understanding
is not reading but just decoding.
I thought they already knew, but it was Ramon who helped me understand.
After reading and discussing a text selection, he exclaimed, "So that's
why I flunked? I didn't really understand what I was reading." He was
genuinely amazed.
As they read, our students progressed through running records, minilessons,
strategy instruction and a variety of checking for understanding activities.
We sensed that many of them were ready for "next steps" and that's
when we introduced series books and early chapter books. Beyond
Leveled Books: Supporting Transitional Readers by Szymusiak and
Sibberson (Stenhouse Publishers) explains this concept of "transition
readers."
Series books and early chapter books are a great bridge for
children at the transitional stage of reading. As they mature as readers,
they will encounter texts with more complex plots, a variety of characters,
and changes in time and setting. When children read series books, they can
begin to notice some of these features and discover ways of understanding
them in text. Series books introduce new complexities to young readers,
but they do it in a way that is supportive and comfortable. (p. 37)
They just love these series and early chapter books! The Poppleton books
and the series about Henry and Mudge, by Cynthia Rylant, are favorites.
Everyone has read at least one Nate the Great mystery and at least one Captain
Underpants' book. The Bailey Street Monster series was very popular
around Halloween, and the Commander Toad books, by Jane Yolen,
make us all chuckle.
By using the lists of reading levels at the back of Guiding
Readers and Writers (Fontas and Pinnell), we move students through
"Just Right" books as they experience the support of series and
early chapter books. The slight changes in difficulty between the levels
are not so great that these readers lose their understanding.
The challenge is that they want to jump too far ahead too soon. "When
do we get to start reading chapter books?" So we are keeping the brakes
on until they can show, in a variety of ways, that they are getting the
understandings from their reading. (We are using running records and comprehension
checks to make sure of student reading levels for "Just Right"
books. But there are many ways to check for understanding.)
Research shows that learning best occurs with many lessons presenting no
more than 10% new material and lots of practice. The
10% Solution: Compound Learning graph (PDF file), based on the work
of Vygotsky, shows a model of this. It's all about "keeping it easy
to learn."
In addition, since non-fiction is not a steady diet yet for most of our
readers, we are compiling a collection of science titles for Read Aloud
selections, series and early chapter books. We will use these to assist
our transition readers with the challenges specific to non-fiction text.
We want to do our best to get them ready for reading in content areas. More
on that later
Leti's update
Moving into series books and early chapter books
Leti has read The Golly Sisters books as well as the Poppleton
and Henry and Mudge titles. She started reading at Level J. Right now, she
is reading at Levels K-L. They correspond to about the beginning of 3rd
grade.
What happened as we went along and what strategies we tried
Leti is doing a better job of selecting books at her level, but she
loses interest in these titles quickly. Helping her improve her reading
stamina by lengthening the amount of time she can spend reading one book
is our current goal. She still has a short attention span for reading. During
a 35 minute Independent Reading block, she will change her reading selections
from her personal book box several times.
How we adjusted and retaught and what progress we've seen
During Reading Conferences, we are using goal setting with Leti. Example:
"Today try spending 15 minutes reading without changing books. Then
next week, try to see if you can spend 20 minutes reading without changing
books. We'll talk about how it's going at our next conference." We
confer about once a week. In September, she changed books constantly, so
there has been some improvement.
See Juli's December curriculum map.
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