Reading Comprehension and Writing Workshop Binders

I love going in to my classroom in the summer. It's quiet and organized and peaceful! I went in this morning to help some teacher friends do some organizing of some books we just got to start building a leveled book library for our school. The power was out from some storms yesterday and it was so peaceful in there! Anyway, I took all of my goodies I've been buying this summer and got to show them off... Target lovers who are reading this, they were both especially geeked about the $1 pocket charts! :)

As promised, I brought home my two binders. These are like my teaching Bibles and I use them to help me plan much of my reading and writing instruction. I am a huge believer of using mentor texts for both reading and writing and, since I LOVE to read to my kiddos, it's a perfect fit for my style. So, you'll see my "book lists" in both of my binders.

Ok. Here is my "Reading Comprehension" binder:

In the front on the left, is a main book list from the book Strategies that Work another book list is what you see on the right. This has more "general" categories that don't tie in to a specific comprehension strategy.


There is a divider for each major strategy: prior knowledge, questioning, visualizing, inferring, connecting, summarizing, evaluating, and synthesizing.


When you open each section there is a book list specific to books that are excellent for highlighting that particular comprehension strategy. Here is a link to one of the lists that I use from The Reading Lady. I also use this list from The Reading Lady.

After the list of picture books, there are printed lessons and files I have made to go with that particular strategy. Many wonderful comprehension lessons can be found at Into the Book.

That's it for my comprehension binder. My favorite part are all the book lists. On most of them, I have gone through and denoted the books that I own... but you can use most any picture book to teach any comprehension strategy.

Next... my writing binder...




Same deal- in the beginning are lists for teaching general writing skills like plot development, setting, strong leads, and good endings. I've just looked and can't find this list on my own computer or online.


After the general list are tab dividers. They are: launching writing workshop, miscellaneous mini-lesson ideas, and then the 6 Traits- ideas, organization, voice, word choice, sentence fluency, conventions, and presentation. The last tab has master copies of student writing resources.

The first two tabs (launching WW and mini-lesson ideas) are the only two tabs that actually have lesson ideas behind them. The others are just collections of picture books that work very well to teach each six-trait skill.

I love, love, love Jennifer Jacobson's book "No More 'I'm Done!'" and have amassed a huge quantity of the picture books that she uses for mini-lessons in the book. So, in my classroom I have two crates- one is full of books that I specifically use to teach writing skills. This one is separated into six-traits sections with a divider between each one. The books have the trait they best fit written inside the cover, as well as the page number and book that I can find the suggested mini-lesson on- either from Jennifer Jacobson or Ruth Culham. And I have wonderful books that I have collected that aren't in either of my favorite teaching resources. I have decided which skill or strategy they are best for and those books are with the others in their crate.

The other crate is full of books that I use to teach reading strategies. Each of those books has the strategy written on the inside cover.

In the picture below you can see my series of crates. The one on the left has my 6-Traits books, the middle one holds my binders and favorite teaching resources, and the one on the right (which you can only see the corner of!) has my reading comprehension picture books.


I think that's it! I just came across this blog "Teach with Picture Books" and am about to go get lost in reading it. I hope it was helpful for you to see how I organize my literacy materials... hopefully you don't think I'm too much of a literacy dork!