The Reading Workshop: Creating Space for Readers

Every teacher will take to heart Frank's gentle guidance on how to create an environment where children and books intersect in the most natural of ways, and I'm positive that [this book] will give teachers the inspiration and guidance they might be searching for to create their own reader's community.
- Georgia Heard

With so many different approaches to teaching reading, how can you make sense of the best paths available? If you begin with Frank Serafini's The Reading Workshop, you can be certain that each step you take will leave a lasting impression. By describing his day-to-day schedule and giving an overview of how the workshop operates over time, he provides a flexible framework you can adapt and implement to suit your needs. And by bringing his love of literature to bear on his instructional ideas, Serafini shows how you can help students learn to read so they want to.

Serafini explains how various practices - literature circles, read alouds, shared reading, and strategy groups - can be incorporated into teaching and how "preplanned engagements" can blend seamlessly with "response-centered" instruction. Suggestions for setting up a classroom library and museum, selecting multicultural literature and cornerstone books, starting the literature study cycle, and creating "shoebox autobiographies," "invested student discussions," and other student projects are accompanied by helpful charts, diagrams, and visuals to help you get started and keep students involved. Throughout the book, examples and vignettes from Serafini's classroom experiences offer vivid testaments to the effectiveness of his workshop approach, even for the most reluctant readers.