This sorting activity addresses critical-thinking skills, observation and categorization processes, and reading comprehension and writing skills, while at the same time providing teachers with a vast array of diagnostics through observation of student interaction and conversation. Students work as a class to sort books, first according to their covers and then according to their topics. They explore whether books could be included in multiple categories and whether some groups could be broken down further. Next, students work with a partner to sort twelve books. They orally explain their sorting criteria, and then record in writing what categories they used and why. Students may also compare and contrast two books using an online Venn diagram.

These lessons compare different versions of the fairy tale, Little Red Riding Hood, giving students an opportunity to talk about the similiarities and differences among the different stories.  Students are then introduced to non-fiction text about wolves to determine different perscpectives of the wolf as a villian in the stories.

This mini unit walks students through the question/discovery process of nonfiction literature.  The first lesson encourages students to wonder while reading.  Then students research to find the answers to their questions.  They explore ways to show/write their new learning.  As a class the kids work to publish 1 or 2 classroom books on the research topic.  This is a great way to introduce the nonfiction unit and then let each student write thier own question book based on the process they used with the class book.

In order to fully comprehend reading materials, students need to understand the cause-and-effect relationships that appear in a variety of fiction and nonfiction texts. In this lesson, students learn cause-and-effect relationships through the sharing of a variety of Laura Joffe Numeroff picture books in a Reader's Workshop format. Using online tools or a printed template, students create an original comic strip via the writing prompt, "If you take a (third) grader to."  Students use various kinds of art to illustrate their strip and publish and present their completed piece to peers in a read-aloud format.

Epic! is a website that gives access to over 20,000 books for kids 12 and under, including audio and read to me books.  

Do worms live underground? Are they good diggers? Can they really read and write? As students read Doreen Cronin's Diary of a Worm in this lesson, they learn to separate the facts from the fictional details. Students begin the lesson by brainstorming what they know about worms. They then begin examining the book in layers. Four read-aloud sessions engage students by focusing attention on different features of the text in each session. In a whole-group setting, students explore the illustrations, fictional details, nonfiction details, and captions and speech bubbles. In this way, students are given concrete strategies that they can use to help differentiate narrative and informational elements in other books they read.

Early Literacy Specialists and Educators may use this power point individually or with staff for development of literacy practices K -2. This tool was designed by the Early Literacy Wisconsin State Reading Association Leadership team. This tool has been used with with teams wishing to deepen their early literacy understanding by reading, discussing the book. The use of the power point will enable educators to strengthen individual and team practices. This tool enables educators to dynamically dig into I am Reading by Kathy Collins and Matt Glover generating close reading and conversation of educators.

Junie B., as she insists on being called, is an opinionated, lively, character in Barbara Park's series of books, and she is sure to delight primary students. In this unit, the teacher reads aloud selections from Junie B., First Grader (at last!). Students discuss the text with a partner and then individually compose sentences about key events from the story. Each student also creates and adds items to a mystery box, or a box that holds items or pictures referenced in the story. After students have listened to the entire story, they use their mystery boxes to retell the story to a classmate. As a culminating activity, students use the mystery boxes and the sentences they composed to make a related stapleless book about the story.

Our goal is for our students to become proficient readers and writers who display agency and independence. This interactive hyperdoc training module, about UDL and Reading Workshop, is designed to help educators develop an ever-growing toolkit of strategies that will remove barriers to learning and create options for how instruction is presented, how students express their ideas, and how we can engage students in their learning.