Now is the perfect time to reflect and focus on your own professional development. It's not always easy to find time for literacy instruction in the classroom, so here are some suggestions for making more time for language and literacy learning.
Now is the perfect time to reflect and focus on your own professional development. It's not always easy to find time for literacy instruction in the classroom, so here are some suggestions for making more time for language and literacy learning.
1. With your grade-level colleagues, design a daily schedule that includes two-and-a-half to three hours of language and literacy teaching:
- If you encounter problems, think "outside the box:" integrate subjects previously taught separately, rearrange your planning periods, reexamine how you incorporate special areas like music and art.
- If you have departmentalization and cannot change it, work on a plan for allocating time for reading, writing, and word study, and for regular communication with other teachers so you can make connections over content areas.
- Compare the time you have allocated for reading with the time you have set aside for writing. Writing is often shortchanged.
- Talk about ways to incorporate more social studies and science into your literacy blocks.
- Discuss ways to be more efficient. Could the first fifteen minutes of the day become part of the independent reading block?
- Try out the schedule for one month and then revise it based on your experience.
2. Reevaluate the existing organizational structures in your classroom. Can some of these be changed? Can you find ways to incorporate some of them into the language and literacy framework?
3. With a group of colleagues, discuss changes you plan to make in terms of time, instructional approaches, classroom structure, or content.
From Guiding Readers and Writers by Irene C. Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell. Copyright (c) 2001 by Irene C. Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell. Published by Heinemann.
