Workshop Wednesday: Organization Idea

This week's topic for Jivey's linky is all about how reading workshop can be organized.

As one of the special education teachers in an inclusion school, most of my day is spent coteaching. The paras that I work with also are moving from room to room to offer support to students throughout the day. As such, I feel that our day is slightly unique and can provide more opportunities for smaller groups and differentiation. As such, things change constantly, luckily I work with a flexible staff who accommodates for the students very well.

In reading, we alternate the format of the class about every 6 weeks or so to keep things fresh and new. The last big format utilized centers. The class I coteach in has about 15 students and 4 adults in the room due to the specific needs of the children who are in the room. Groups were divided heterogeneously. I personally feel that inclusion works because students on IEPs can work along with peers, or at least see peers as models, so whenever possible grouping choices also try and reflect that.

Each group rotation lasted just under 20 minutes. The classroom teacher worked on reading skills. The two paras took a group that was reading independently, and would move around from student to student throughout the week to read with each child. The final group worked with me and we read through a novel and worked on projects tied to that novel study. I'm a huge fan of sticky notes, so when/if notes were needed, I recorded them on a sticky note to remember for later.

I saw an idea on Pinterest once that I liked and tried to implement. This quick/easy idea utilized a folder with divided sections and sticky notes. This works great for keeping notes in the classes I'm actually working in. With our small group rotations, if I noticed a particular strength/weakness I'd jot a quick note and quickly put it in the folder. Everything was already at my small group table and it worked quite well. (I tried to do something similar with IEP goals, it didn't work quite so well, but I made something that worked well to record progress on those.)