Day 20: Reading Stations

This week, Kim and I started reading stations.

We’d tried TC’s 5th grade reading units with a workshop model and had little success with them. As a new school, we haven’t had a curriculum that students have followed since kindergarten, meaning there are large gaps and inconsistencies in what students are capable of doing. We were finding it hard to engage all students in the mini-lessons, whether reading happened earlier in the day or at the end of the day. We also saw a need for more consistent language study (vocabulary, spelling, grammar, conventions), but couldn’t figure out how to fit it in our day. Squeezing it in at the end of writer’s workshop was too rushed, and when we missed it, it just… wasn’t happening.

In the fall, we both took the Shifting the Balance upper elementary course and realized that there were many other practical activities we could be doing, but that didn’t fit into our reading block as it was. When our investigation stations that we began in January were so successful, we decided to try a similar model for reading.

There are six stations: indie reading, read with friends, write about reading, fluency practice, word study (using Structured Word Inquiry), and sentence study (using Judith Hochman’s Writing Revolution). The two language study stations are teacher-led, and the others are independent. Students go through two stations in a day (20 minutes in each), and cycle through all six after 3 days. Then it repeats.

With February break and our theater show and the overnight, we couldn’t start the stations until this week. Today, after the second class, the students shared during Closing Circle some of the things they were enjoying about reading stations so far. Here’s what a few of our boys had to say (boys who are semi-reluctant readers!):

“Something that I like about reading stations is that we get to do many things, we get to move from one to another. It really makes me feel like I get so many options to do super cool stuff to read. Like, I never knew that. When I hear reading, it’s just like, reading, indie reading. Now I know that there are many things to do when it comes to reading. Super cool.”

“Something I like about reading stations is the word study and kind of like, it changed like, I saw that reading isn’t only looking at a paper and seeing the words.”

“Something that I liked about reading is the word study and the sentence study and indie reading because I like to read by myself.”

“Something I’m enjoying in reading stations is learning new words and the history of words.”

We headed to dismissal feeling buoyed by their positivity. I’m so grateful to work with Kim, who’s just as enthusiastic about trying new things as I am, and I’m excited to see how reading stations go for the rest of the year!