Launching Readers and Writers Workshops

The wordless picture books that we read in class last week helped lay a good foundation to encourage us to tell our stories through pictures. The level of thinking and acute observational skills that are required to follow the story line through the illustrations tells a lot about the success of a person as a reader or writer. We read Journey by Aaron Becker

  and Wave by Suzy Lee.

These wonderful pieces of literature have assured us that reading is more than just decoding words and that writing stories through pictures is very much acceptable to be an author.
This week the Lightning Dragons were introduced to the workshop model of Reading and Writing.
There are essentially three steps to this. First there is a short mini lesson, second we engage in reading and/or writing and lastly we have a few friends who share their work with the rest of the group.
Readers Workshop:
As we launched our Readers workshop, we realized that we could read many symbols around the school and that was primarily what reading was about. Making meaning!! We also talked about how we develop good reading habits as we respect other readers around us and our books, handling them with care. Here are the Lightning Dragons as early readers in Kindergarten.

 Writers Workshop: We have had a couple of sessions of writing workshop this week. We learned that writers 1. Think. 2. Draw. 3. Add details to their drawings. 4. Label these and / or write about them.

Whether it is writing or reading, we always need to remember......
"When we are done.....we have just begun"