Workshop Wednesday: Talking with a Text

This week is our third week of school and second full week. We're finally into a lot of our routines and we've been launching Reader's Workshop. Yesterday, we worked on adding "hieroglyphics" to mark spots in our reading. Today, we learned how to have a conversation with our reading. This is a newer lesson for me this early in the year but the students did such a great job. After our private conversation with the text, we met in groups and shared our reactions and questions.

We started with a "Fat Questions Starters" half sheet glued int our notebooks. My amazing teaching partner created our sheet which you can grab for free from my Dropbox.

Side note: Go check out her blog over at Endeavors in Innovative Teaching! She's just getting started but has some amazing ideas....


First, I modeled the strategy with the first paragraph/section with an article we chose about iPads helping students with autism. Here's my notebook:

Then students started their private "talk" with the text.
Here's what students came up with...

One student really struggled with asking questions of the text, so allowed him to just use hieroglyphics today... This shows me he was actively reading and not just sitting there but we'll still need to work on questioning.

How do you get students interacting with at text?