Finding a Reading Partner

During reading workshop, we've been asking ourselves a big question - "How can we author our own reading lives?"  Living a readerly life means we are people who talk about and discuss books.  We're people who know how to find good books, read good books, and then share these books with others.  We decided that each person in the class should find a reading partner - someone who reads similar kinds of books and has similar kinds of reading interests.  We spent this particular morning interviewing each other - going around the room sharing our stack of favorite books and learning about each other as readers.  I was able to catch some of the conversations on video, and I thought you'd like seeing our kids in action. 

Stop-Think-React

Good readers are active readers - they're not passive. Good readers constantly ask questions, make predictions, form inferences, and find connections. One way we've been practicing this stance is by using a strategy called "stop-think-react." You do just what it says! In this instance, partners were reading a National Geographic Explorer article together. At different places in the text, they would stop, think, and discuss their ideas with each other. Here are a few of our kids sharing their thinking...