Please note that this project focuses on the Lucy Caulkins Readers & Writers Workshop - there may be room to grow as the year goes on, but the curricular needs of our language arts program will take priority.

Participating Schools:


Enduring Understandings:

• Good readers use strategies to deepen their understanding.
• Good readers read fluently and with expression, paying particular attention to the conventions of grammar.
• Authentic audiences encourage good reading and writing.
• Collaboration and communication both inside and outside the classroom will prepare students for being productive citizens within our global society.

Essential Questions:

• How do I use reading strategies to deepen my understanding?
• Why is fluency important?
• How does my audience influence or affect my reading and writing?
• How does collaborating with others help me to learn?
  

Assessment:

• Student self reflection
• Teacher self reflection
• Class blog as portfolio

GRASPS Task:

Goal: Your goal is to entertain your audience with personal stories about reading strategies
Role: Broadcasting team: On-Air Personality/Show Host, Producer, Writers, Mixing Team, Manager
Audience: Peers at ISB, both younger and same-age, partner classes around the world
Situation: You need to teach your audience effective reading strategies
Purpose: To collaborate with your  team to effectively communicate reading strategies to a wide audience

Supporting activities ideas to build on:

• commenting quality - rubric for commenting
• specific points in the year where you pick an earlier piece of writing that you rework and link back to old version to see the growth

Planned activities to support learning:

• Introduction to online safety
• Introduction to blogging
• Introduction to GarageBand/Audacity
  
• Podcasting a written piece for fluency
• Posting a podcast
• Read a story from a book for practicing fluency to be podcast later
  
• Developing quality commenting skills
• Collaborative teaming to develop a podcast focused on reading strategies
• Reflective pieces of writing on the blog
  

Reader's Workshop Weekly Podcasting Checklist:

Brainstorm:
Before you start your podcast:

•  Choose a strategy from this week’s Reader’s Workshop lessons as a group. Think about which would be the most beneficial for other students (your intended audience).

Plan:
Write your script. Your script must include:

• An introduction to your podcast: who is speaking, where you are, why you are making this podcast.
• A description of your Reader’s Workshop strategy and why you chose it for this podcast.
• Discuss how this strategy helps you, using specific examples from the book.
• Make sure you include specific references to where you have used inference skills with your chosen reading strategy.
• A conclusion inviting your audience to listen to future podcasts.

Create:
Record your podcast:

• Make sure that you are in a quiet place – you don’t want background noise included in your recording.
• Make sure that your voices are clear and loud – watch the audio leveler to verify that your voice can be heard.
• Make sure everyone has a chance to speak.
• When you’re finished listen to your recording all the way through to make sure it sounds good and that you’ve included everything on your checklist.
• Once your recording is entirely finished AND you have time, add the intro and outro music.
• Export your podcast to the Desktop (Share, Export Song to Disk, save with your names).

Finish:
Publicize on the class blog:

• Write a short post announcing your podcast with a picture of the book you referenced in your podcast.

Supporting Lessons:

1. Introduce the project, listen to a sample podcast (show iTunes), refresher of Garage Band, have students explore with GB to create an intro audio track (1/2 class) and an outro track (1/2) class - vote on which ones to use for our class.

2. Practice writing a script in groups as a full class, record a trial podcast to see how the process works, listen and critique.

3.  Consider discussing points such as

• "no gaps" between intro/outro music and the voices of the podcast.

• Making your podcast sound like a conversation rather than a set of recorded voices.
• Some words to end the reading strategy talked about (ie:  That's a great example of how to use this week's strategy.  Thanks for listening .....)
• Always saving everything to the desktop - work from the desktop, not from flash drive or server