For my 4th and 5th grade advanced English Language Learner (ELL) guided reading groups, I've been teaching using the teaching points from a unit of study off of the Columbia Teacher's College Reading and Writing Project website. The units were written by Lucy Calkin's graduate students and are very well developed, but tweakable.
I, for example, just use the teaching points. I make up my own connection, model, active engagement, and link to better meet my students' and my own needs. I skip the mid-workshop interruption most days, unless I cannot hold back since after the mini-lesson, I need all the time I can get listening to kids read and they to reading. If we have time, I try to do the share. But since I do the share infrequently and with little time I do it a little poorly and the students ability to share well reflects this with at least one of my groups.
SWBAT: make connections; use their backgroud knowledge; write personal responses; converse and share in a book group or guided reading group
The wall chart above shows the questions from the unit's first week teaching points. Ultimately, these are the questions that students will likely use to make a bookmark out of. You may notice that the language is quite advanced, especially for ELLs, but I always talk about the key, challenging vocabulary, restate the vocabulary with a synonym or rephrase for complex grammar/syntax.
My students thought I was pretty silly when I started referring to characters as friends, but they could easily understand caring about a character in a movie (e.g. Bambi when the mom died, etc.). After a few minilessons, we have talked about and practiced making connections everyday. The above poster shows how we started to extend our discussion of one connection. The below poster shows my example of comparing and contrasting my experience and that of character in the book with a David Hyerle double bubble and an introduction to what book groups do.
What I like about the book group teaching points is that I can emphasize and rationalize my goal of creating rigour for each child. I hope that with my rational, most students will be more accepting of working hard.
