Wednesday, June 28th
Ahaa moments and significant insights from the last two days:

• Students are NOT meant to achieve mastery during the mini lesson.  If a student could achieve mastery during a 10 minute lesson they don't need the lesson! It should take considerable practice through independent reading and conferring for students to master the skill of the mini lesson.
• We need to keep track of our students reading levels at the time they took our annual high stakes test. This will start giving us some ability to predict who will achieve and develop benchmarks for reading levels at each grade.
• Do not have students follow along in text during read aloud. They need to attend to your phrasing and fluency as well as develop listening skills. The teacher's read aloud skills need to be top notch (read like an actor).
• Performance Based Reading Assessments (PBRA) in 3-5: The text should be read aloud to children while they follow along.  These assessments are not assessing comprehension they are assessing skills, if you have children read independently you don't know if the problem is mastery of the skill or a comprehension issue. Comprehension is assessed during Running Records. We will discuss this during August PD.
• When students are reading Nonfiction they should not be holding a pencil- then they just become recorders and it slows down their volume of reading.
• If students in 3-5 are still needing work in foundational skills their small group instruction might be shared reading (I know, I always thought shared reading was for K-2 kids!). Follow the model in the back of second grade units. 
• The books in the classroom library should reflect the genre in which you are working (fiction or nonfiction). This doesn't mean that you will not have any nonfiction books in the library during a fiction unit, but that you will hold back a significant amount of nonfiction books and add them to the library (with great fanfare!) during the nonfiction unit. You might hold back some of your best historical fiction books until the corresponding unit, etc.
• The books in the classroom library should reflect the span of levels in your classroom. If your class is reading levels J-R, then you will not have levels below a J out on the shelves (you might pass these books on to a teacher who needs them for her library). The library should be fluid and ever changing.
• Consider having most of your library in interest/genre bins. For example, a bin of books with "disgusting humor", "kids in trouble", "crazy families," etc. A student should be able to go to the library and know they will find a book they can read AND a book they like.