Reading Log

3/22/11

Calkins:
Observations:
- Staff developers come into schools and helps groups of
teachers at one or two grade levels plan and teach new units
of study
- Pages 22-25 A recommended curricular calendar
- It is important for each day’s workshop to have a clear, simple
structure. Children should know what to expect. This allows
them to carry on; it frees the teacher from choreographing
activities and allows time for listening.
- Room arrangements, page 31
- Materials, pages 32-33
- Often a teacher will pause in the midst of a minilesson and
ask children to try what the teacher has just taught.
- Teachers teach children how to switch from listening to the
teacher to interacting with a partner.
- We teach children that writing time is precious and that it’s
important that they do not waste one precious moment of it.
- It’s easy to lose a tremendous amount of time in transitions;
and therefore we need to teach children how to get started on
their writing.
- Page 41 – The Management The Makes One-to-One
Conferences Possible chart
- Try to avoid launching minilessons with questions, and above
all, avoid asking known-answer questions in which you’re
looking for a particular answer.
- Teachers probably need to spend as much time planning a
minilesson as we spend teaching it.
- Page 55 and Page 60 – Minilesson Teaching Info and Tip
charts

Wonderings: Should every day start off with a minilesson? Or should

they be in the middle of the day? How many minilessons should be
done each day? How do you plan a minilesson that involves both math
and reading/writing skills?

Connections: The first grade teacher I observed last year did

minilessons with math. She would have everyone sit on the carpet and
she would sit on a chair with a big pad of paper and do mini math
lessons. The children would sit with dry-erase boards and would do a
few practie problems and hold their answers up for the teacher to see.
“Kidwatching”
OBSERVATIONS:

- Functions of written language that are familiar to students:

o Environmental print- provides information about the world
around us
o Occupational print- used to do one’s job
o Informational print- for storing, organizing, and retrieving
information
o Recreational print- used for leisure activities
- Format: refers to the “shape” or configuration, that written
language takes when it is used to serve a specific function
- Graphophonics: refers to the systematic relations between
patterns of letters and patterns of sounds
- Children discover the orthographic system as they experiment
with reading and writing, and as they participate socially in
literacy events
- Understanding the letter patterns systematically relate to sound
patterns is a major step toward being able to communicate
through reading and writing
- Alphabetic principle: when children begin to invent spellings for
words
- Drawings help children rehearse and develop ideas for writing,
supply information about characters, settings, and events,
disambiguate text, and they help others understand what has
been written
- Cumulative records should be kept of each child, which includes:
o Self-selected pieces of writing
o Self-evaluations
o Goals for future learning

CONNECTIONS:
I frequently see invented spelling for words in my kindergarten
classroom, and I also did last year in my first grade classroom. At first,
to me, their writing just looks like random words and it’s hard to
decipher. But, when going over the student’s writing with them, it is
more clear what their invented spelling really says.

WONDERINGS:
- What age are children when they start using invented words and
stop drawing to tell stories? What age should children be when
 they stop using invented words?
- When should teachers start keeping cumulative records? When
are they no longer necessary?