Book Club Model in 4th Grade

The book club model seems to fit in pretty well to my classroom. Even though the book club plus seems more apt for k-2. Our class focuses heavily on reading and writing independently. We have a reading workshop block in the morning, followed by a read aloud. The morning is wrapped up with a writers workshop. The read aloud is done daily from a chapter book where the teacher models everything for the students. She shows the class lessons on retelling, predicting, inferring, context clues, and other strategies which are mentioned and encouraged by Raphael, Florio-Ruane, et al. (2004). Soon the class will be starting Reader’s Notebooks. These will be a space for the students to jot down notes, questions, ideas that they are having about the book they are reading (their Just Right Books) or the classroom novel from read aloud. These can act as authentic writing opportunities for the students and will be included as a part of their reading homework.

Once these reading notebooks are initiated the students will have more opportunities to write into, through, and out of a unit/text. For now, we are working on developing reading strategies for choosing and sticking with a book that is just right for the reader. Writing is focused on launching an idea and working on stamina for writing endurance. Using the notebooks is supposed to help teach the students different strategies for reading and comprehension. We use these notebooks to help model different strategies within the notebook. Today we started the notebooks and focused on using “beginning, middle, and end”. The students are asked to summarize each chapter. We are using these to help with oral and written retellings of texts. These are important parts of their literacy instruction for fourth grade because they will be considered below reading level and “at risk” if they are unable to accurately retell a text through writing.