Just as the management of book clue plus suggests that much thought go in to creating groups for book club that takes into consideration the different personalities of the students so also there was much thought that went into planning table groups. We talked to all of the kindergarten teachers to get a feel for the students personalities and what combinations to avoid. We also looked at assessments from last year to see if a student was generally high or low academically. We even looked on the demographics part of the roster to make sure there were a variety of ethnicities present at each table.
For Guided reading we have a Fountas and Pinnell leveling system and once we find out what reading level each child is at we will be able to start guided reading instruction groups. Those groups will be mainly created based on what reading level they are at. My CT said that once the students reach level G/H or higher she places them into “book clubs.” What she calls book club sounds primarily like student guided reading time with weekly check-ins to see if students comprehend the material. This Guided reading time and eventually “book club” time will occur in conjunction with our Daily 5 class time. During this time one group of students will be pulled over to the teaching table while the rest of the class will read to self, write in journals, read to someone or do word work.
We do have read aloud each day but I would not confident in calling it a book club. The teacher is the only one who has a book. She reads it to the class and then the class has a brief conversation about some element of it. I could see giving students additional access to these books by previewing it in some of the guided reading groups.
The Book also talked about the importance of having a theme to center books and discussions around. Our literacy piece definitely has a theme and it is also suppose to tie into the social studies theme. In our writers’ workshop however it seems there really is no theme so our curriculum often seems fragmented. I hope to connect at least a few more of the pieces as I plan my unit, though this may be hard since the writers’ workshop piece is very scripted.
In order to do this I will need the support of the other First grade teacher
s since all the classrooms try to collaborate to have similar curriculum. I will also need to find guided reading books that relate to the theme being covered and get enough copies for each of the students.
We will most likely have something similar going in my classroom related to the when the students reach a certain level then they will be placed in book clubs. After reading the book club plus book I hope they do because i would really like to see it in the classroom, but also like you it would have to approved by all three first grade teachers because we put all 58 first graders together and have broken them up into three groups and one teacher will have the below level,one will have the on-level and one will have the advanced and the teachers will be rotating the groups to each other.
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