[audriana]

I've enjoyed reading the posts and blogs about readers workshop. For those of you who are giving your kids a large chunk of time to read, do you pull guided reading groups during that block? If so, when do you find time to conference with your kids who are reading?
I pull my students for guided reading and I havea group doing workstations, and another group doing independent reading and keeping track of their thinking. (My kids also have a response letter due once a week, so they work on that one day during their IR time.)

My other question is about guided reading. I have worked in different schools with different expectations. What does it look like at your guided reading table? Do you start out with word work, then have kids read silently (or aloud), walk around the table listening to kids read to see what strategies they are using, then a follow up activity? do you have them do that at the table? Or, do you have the kids read and answer questions? Or do you just have groups meet independently and do lit. circle questions/activities?

I love reading about what different teachers are doing!

[Angel Star]

While kids are reading independently, I conference with individual students.

I also have a partner reading time. This is when I meet with a partnership. I don't do groups larger than 2 kids anymore, maybe 3. Each partnership is reading a chapter book and answering questions in a packet that I created (not just recall questions, but critical thinking as well). I meet with one partnership a day and since I have only 10 children, I can meet with one partnership a week.

I don't have workstations. After the mini-lesson/shared reading/think alouds, the kids do partner reading and then independent reading.

[Buggy4Books]

We have strategy groups two days a week, where we confer with a small group based on similar needs, interests, or challenges we can supply them with.

Three days a week we do individual conferences with students. We travel to their book nooks to confer with them, because it's much easier than having them gather their things and meet us. Plus, we get to multitask and keep a watch on strategies other readers are using. On hand, we carry our clipboards with us to make sure we are writing down the teaching point for that conference, future teaching points, and a date. This way we'll be able to quickly look and see who we haven't conferenced with recently and who we need to check up with. In a good week, we'll meet with every student each week, providing them with individualized instruction/scaffolding to help them master a new area of reading!

Hope this helps!
If you want to read up on how RW conferences go, I'd suggest "Conferring with Readers"

[audriana]

Thanks for the feedback. I'm trying to figure out how to meet the district mandate of three guided reading groups a day and still be able to implement an authentic readers workshop.

[pmpkin]

My reader's workshop lasts about 75 minutes.
I usually spend 10-20 minutes on mini-lesson
the class reads independently while I pull guided reading groups-as much as I try, I can only seem to get two groups in each day (20 min. per group) *with my low group-I spend some time with vocabulary/decoding/word work but with all of the others we work on employing all strategies needed before, during, after reading. For the most part, students read silently to a certain stopping point then record thoughts or discuss.
I always spend at least 10 minutes as a group share-I get so much information about their ind. reading during this discussion time