The mini-lessons focus on reading and writing skills and strategies and on procedural elements of the workshop. After a break for gym, music, art, library, or computer instruction, the Communications Workshop resumes with quiet writing in daybooks. After quiet writing, students engage in a variety of writing pursuits as they continue the writing segment of Communications Workshop. Several days a week we will end Communications Workshop with a sharing time. At this time students and adults may read their writing or tell about a book they have enjoyed during Workshop.
Listeners offer their comments and questions.
At regularly scheduled conferences at Choice Time every two weeks we help the students to set appropriate literacy goals. We encourage them to balance their goals so that they are working on both skills and strategies in reading and writing. During Communications Workshop we work individually with children to monitor their progress on the literacy goals they have chosen. Show me how you worked on your goals in your daybook today. During the reading segment of workshop we discuss books with children and listen to them read, noting their use of reading strategies.