Book Club Plus framework seemingly focuses on a range of literary activities including community share, independent reading, writer’s workshop, shared reading, teacher read aloud and guided reading and literacy centers. This model focuses on the use of themes throughout all avenues, and especially focuses on creating authentic literacy contexts in the classroom. The instructional elements concentrate on the four core target areas: comprehension, writing, language conventions and literary aspects. This model creates an environment that gives students varies opportunities to engage in texts, talk and writing as students read, reflect and create.
Literacy instruction in my classroom occurs throughout much of the school day. The students have numerous opportunities to work with texts at a multitude of levels and through various activities. The school day begins with a teacher read aloud. The students engage in listening, speaking and strategizing to understand the text. There is much talk and discussion through such scaffolding by the teacher. The morning is similar to that of Janine’s morning routine, as described in Chapter Two. In this event, the teacher read aloud for both classrooms are used as the Book Club story. There is substantial discussion based on this book as well as modeling, scaffolding and facilitating strategies and skills through opening community share. In this instance, the Book Club Plus model parallels instruction in my own classroom. “In [both of these] settings teachers explicitly teach and model strategies that students can use to prepare for reading, to record ideas and responses, to make meaning as they read and to monitor their progress” (44)
From here the students engage in a writing element that directly correlates with the reading strategy presented at community share and teacher read aloud. The students follow by writing a piece on the comprehension strategy for the day. For example, today the focus was on visualization. After modeling, scaffolding and facilitating, the students were asked to complete a journal that described the “snapshots” they saw in their minds during the story and to create an illustration of what they had pictured. The students are also asked to engage in independent reading throughout the day when their work has been completed.
After the community share and teacher read aloud, there is an hour literacy block, which focuses on center work and guided reading groups. The students participate in writing, listening, independent reading, computer and word study centers. There is also a rotation into guided reading. I have yet to see this take place, as centers will begin next week. Currently the teacher is STEP testing in order to understand where the students are at and what needs to be improved. The teacher creates guided reading groups based on this information and their reading levels (hopefully these scores will be dynamic and thus reading groups will change). During this time, the students have been given time to read independently.
When time allows, the teacher will also facilitate word study. Here, the students are subjected to phonemic awareness (blending, segmenting), letter sound knowledge and spelling. Shared reading occurs on occasion.
In the afternoon there is also a block of time given to writer’s workshop. Here the students are given opportunities to write and create. In the morning, students are able to write and engage in critical thinking about texts. However, during this time I have only seen students creating based on their own lives. This time does not seem to meet the objectives described in Book Club Plus (Writing into, through, out of). However, the students are focusing on “what good writers do”. This does not seem to parallel the model from BCP, which seemingly focuses on writing in conjunction with reading.
“Language and literacy skills are learned through socially interactive settings that allow children to play with language”. In the classroom the students are often part of the discussions. Whether it is teacher led, student led, whole class or small group, there is frequent discussions happening in the classroom. These discussions occur in language arts, mathematics, social studies and science. Some discussions however are more meaningful than others. Though in my opinion, I feel the students should be given a greater chance to really articulate what may be going through their minds and more opportunities to investigate and construct their own knowledge, just as the Book Club Plus framework explains.
Overall, I believe that there are several avenues in which the Book Club Plus framework articulates that are also apparent in my own classroom. However, I feel that my classroom does not integrate all avenues into themes that would create a cohesive literacy instruction. Rather my classroom touches on all aspects that are covered throughout Book Club Plus but are not easily connected. Book Club Plus seemed to integrate all literacy instruction into themes that would be present throughout all the avenues.
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