Fish Bowl discussions allow students that are reading the same book to hold a structured conversation about a book and receive feedback from their classmates.
Reader’s Workshop
- Sustained Silent Reading + Conferencing – teachers guide students to choose “just right books” to read for 40+ minutes each day (20 minutes at school, 20+ minutes at home). Teachers teach mini-lessons (mostly on comprehension strategies, but also on how to keep a reading log, choose great books, etc.), and then conference with students one-on-one to check in and set goals each few weeks.
SSR is the bread and butter of the workshop. Students must become independent, driven readers in fourth and fifth grade.
- Literature Circles – students read the same book as a small group of peers or the whole class and hold structured discussions. They have jobs such as summarizer, discussion director, illustrator, etc. This kind of academic discussion is some of the most important work of fourth and fifth grade and requires extensive teacher scaffolding.
- Read aloud – happens more or less every day and not only helps relax students but pushes thinking to new levels as students construct meaning with teacher guidance. Some favorites in Cerrito: A Wrinkle in Time, My Side of the Mountain, One Crazy Summer, The Ygyssey, and many others.
- Reader’s Theater – students practice reading scripts from folk tales to Shakespeare. The purpose is to strengthen fluency. Many students enter fourth grade uncomfortable reading in front of a crowd, and this helps loosen them up.
- Interdisciplinary reading experiences – let us not forget the importance of gaining literacy skills in science and cultural studies, not to mention mathematics. Thinking is deepened by content knowledge, and reading is the best way to acquire said knowledge.
Reading buddies give Cerrito students the opportunity to read and interact with younger children. Sometimes it’s a handful!
Writers Workshop
- The Chanterelle is the literary magazine of the Cerrito Creek classroom. Students draft many entries in writers notebooks, develop drafts, revise and edit, and eventually publish their work by typing it. They read the final product in Author’s Chair, and their pieces become part of the Cerrito library collection in perpetuum.
Cutting and pasting bumpy, smooth, and sharp words from magazines during the poetry unit. We call poetry in the “mother genre” in Cerrito (thanks Nancy Atwell).
- Grammar, Spelling, Mini-lessons, Workbooks – Fourth and fifth graders generally need oodles of practice on the mechanics of writing, and we employ a battery of strategies to support this growth, from Wordly Wise vocabulary development to Words Their Way differentiated spelling, to a host of lessons on style, punctuation, etc. Students even learn how to spell words with their bodies (check out the image on the homepage of students spelling “Cerrito”)
- Typing and cursive handwriting – yes, we practice them both, and our hope is that students will be proficient at both by the end of fifth grade.
- Interdisciplinary writing – students will write, write, write across the curriculum to show their understanding of the need for a Constitution or how electrons pass through a circuit. Writing is a way of life in Cerrito, and it is not by any means limited to the workshop.
