Scheduling Tips for Creating an Effective Literacy Block (SOR Summer Series Part 7)

You’re listening to episode number 209 of the Stellar Teacher Podcast.

Welcome to our seventh and final episode in our Stellar Teacher Science of Reading Summer Series. Next week, we are going to go back to our regular podcast schedule, which means we’ll have a new episode coming out every Monday. So if you just started listening to the Stellar Teacher Podcast this summer, then let me just say that I’m so glad that you found us, and I really hope that you stick around and continue to listen to us as the school year goes on.

So today, to wrap up our summer series, we are going to talk about, how do you create a literacy block where everything really fits together? But before we get into that, I do want to let you know that doors to the Stellar Literacy Collective are open for enrollment this week. My team and I love this time of year, because we love it when we get to open up the membership to new teachers. We love getting to know our members. And so for us, this enrollment week kind of feels like our back-to-school season, when you get to meet your students for the first time. So it’s been so fun welcoming in new teachers. If you want access to a resource library that is going to help you implement a lot of the things that you’ve heard me talk about this summer, and you also want the support and the encouragement to implement more SOR aligned practices in your classroom, we would love to have you join us inside the membership. You can sign up at stellarteacher.com/join. But also, if you have questions about the membership or you want to learn more, you can always send me a direct message on Instagram @thestellarteachercompany. My team and I will be happy to answer any questions that you might have.

So this summer, as you guys know, I have been briefly talking about the Simple View of Reading to really explain the big picture perspective of what effective reading instruction looks like. So by now, you can probably recite this in your sleep; we know that word recognition times language comprehension equals strong reading comprehension. And so we really understand that students need to have both word recognition and language comprehension skills, and both of those skills need to be strong if we want our students to be able to comprehend what they read. Which means we need to be mindful of and aware of providing instruction that supports both word recognition and language comprehension.

So during our summer series, we’ve talked about a variety of aspects that fit into both of those categories. We’ve talked about how we can help our students develop more “mental velcro”. We’ve talked about how to use text structure as a roadmap for reading. We’ve talked about how to provide both explicit and implicit vocabulary instruction. I shared five strategies to help improve student fluency. I gave you some suggestions for organizing your classroom library. And we also talked about a process to help students read and decode big words. Now if you have tuned in to all of these episodes in this series, I hope that you are feeling really proud of yourself for acquiring all of this new literacy content knowledge. That’s a lot right there. And I also hope that it makes you really excited to implement these things in the fall.

But like I said, so often teachers are looking for advice because they want to know, how does everything fit together, right? I have all of these individual strategies. I’ve listened to all these podcast episodes. I know all of these little things, but how do I create a literacy block where everything just comes together and fits in a nice, cohesive way? So I’m going to share a few tips and suggestions that will help you put everything together in your literacy block.

So the first thing that I want you to do is really create essential buckets for your literacy block. And what do I mean by a bucket? A bucket is simply just a larger chunk of time that you’re going to dedicate to different aspects of your literacy block. So if you have 90 minutes or 120 minutes, and you’re teaching both reading and writing, you’re obviously going to allocate portions of that 90 minutes to cover different aspects of literacy. So here are the different buckets that I think you should try to or plan on including in your literacy block.

So the first one is having a dedicated word study time, and during this time you’re going to do things like provide explicit vocabulary lessons. You’re going to explicitly teach morphology, where you’ll introduce prefixes, suffixes and roots. You’re going to teach your students how to use context clues. You can explicitly teach spelling rules to your students. You can teach syllabication. There are so many different word study concepts, and especially in upper elementary we want to make sure that we have time to really cover and address them all. So having a dedicated portion of your literacy block dedicated to Word Study is really important.

So another bucket that you want to have is your reading comprehension bucket, right? So we want to have whole group lessons, or a whole group portion of our literacy block that is really dedicated to helping our students with reading comprehension, and this is where you’re going to teach and cover a lot of your standards. But that’s not the only thing that we want to have happening during this portion of our literacy block. We don’t want to just be focused on teaching our standards. We really want to help our students develop content knowledge and understand what they’re reading. So what are some things that could happen during this time, during these whole group reading comprehension lessons? You could be explicitly teaching students about nonfiction text structure. You could be doing a read aloud from a class novel. You could be working your way through a set of related text sets that are connected to science or social studies with your students. Maybe you are deconstructing a sentence from a text that you’re reading to help your students really comprehend at the sentence level. And maybe you are engaging in fluency practice with your students by doing some repeated or choral readings. All of those things could fit into this whole group reading comprehension time.

Now we also want to have a time to focus on writing, so having whole group writing, and this could also maybe have some independent practice writing or small group writing, kind of depending on what your students specifically need. But we want to make sure that our students are doing things like engaging in sentence writing activities, that we are explicitly teaching them how to write paragraphs and maybe moving into essay writing at some point, that we’re modeling things like revision skills, like using transition words and editing details that we’re giving our students opportunities to give and get peer feedback on their writing. So all of those are examples of things that you could include in the writing portion of your literacy block.

And then we want to have small group and independent practice. And I say these two together because they usually go hand in hand. So while you are pulling small groups, the rest of your class is working on some form of independent practice. And even if you’re not ready to start pulling small groups, your students can still engage in independent practice. You just would be there to circulate, provide support, provide feedback, while your students are getting independent practice. Independent Practice is definitely an important part of your literacy block. You don’t want to be just teaching, teaching, teaching, teaching, without ever giving them an opportunity to practice. So this independent practice portion is an important part of your literacy block. So let’s think about what are some different things that could happen during this time. Your students could be independently reading, but they could also be writing a summary or a book recommendation, either from something they have read, or maybe they’re summarizing the book that you read as a whole group during your whole group lesson. Maybe they are practicing fluency by either recording what they’ve read or preparing for a performance reading. Maybe they’re engaging in some sort of word study, sort where they’re either building words or completing a word ladder or a word matrix, something like that. So they’re doing something with word study. And I think it’s important to recognize that independent practice does not have to be limited to just reading comprehension, and it also does not need to be limited to just independent reading. We really want to think about what do our students need, and what type of practice could we give them that would help them grow in some aspect of literacy, whether that is word recognition or language comprehension. So just keep in mind that independent practice can have practice can have a much broader definition than what we often give it.

And then the final bucket that I want you to think about and plan for is your transition time. And I think it’s really important that you are going to have transitions during your literacy block. Whether that is getting your students to come down to the carpet for a read aloud, or getting them to go back to their desks, so that way you can start pulling small groups and they work on independent practice, or even if you’re just switching between reading and writing, that transition is going to take some time. And I think oftentimes teachers look at their schedule on paper and they wonder, why does this not match up to the reality of what is happening? And one of the first things I encourage them to check is look at how much transition time you are building in, and is it realistic? Start to think about every time you transition between a literacy block bucket, you really want to account for some sort of transition time. And recognize, I think too, at the start of the year, students are going to be slower to transition between the portions of your literacy block. And so recognize that switching between word study and your whole group reading comprehension lesson, and then onto your writing lesson that might take more time than it will in, let’s say October or December. So be patient with yourself and your students.

Okay, so that’s the first tip, is to create buckets for your literacy block. The next thing I really want you to keep in mind and remember is that we don’t have to teach every single literacy aspect or component in isolation. So once you have your buckets, I want you to realize that not everything needs to be kept separate in its individual bucket. That there is going to be overlap between our literacy buckets, and honestly, there should be overlap between what we’re teaching in word study, and reading comprehension, and writing, and small group, and that’s because reading and writing does not happen in isolation. When we’re actually reading and writing, it’s a combination of us using all of these skills that we’ve learned, and we want to make sure students recognize how everything works together to help them become skilled readers and writers.

So, I think teachers sometimes get hung up, and I was the same way when I was in the classroom, is when you’re trying to find individual time slots for every individual literacy element. So you’re trying to find time daily for spelling and daily time for vocabulary, and time to teach prefixes, suffixes, and roots, and time to practice fluency, and time to focus on sentence deconstruction, and time to read aloud and time for independent reading, and then time for writing about reading, and then time to actually teach writing. And we’re trying to find all this time, and it doesn’t necessarily always exist, because we don’t have to teach every single thing in isolation, and we don’t have to teach every single thing every single day. So don’t try to find time for all the small literacy tasks you need to teach. But instead, really look for ways that you can overlap and connect the different buckets.

So some examples, before you begin a read-aloud, you can explicitly teach a new vocabulary word and use the five-step process I shared in episode number 192. So technically, vocabulary is word study, but this is going to take place during your reading comprehension bucket, so there’s overlap between word study and reading comprehension. Maybe during independent practice, your students can build or expand a sentence that is going to help them summarize what they’re reading. They could identify the who, is doing what, when, where, why and how, and so they’re going to be writing about what they’re reading, but they’re also going to be working on their sentence writing skills and working on expanding a sentence. So it’s both reading and writing, there’s some overlap there. During small group time you could introduce your students to the process I shared last week that will help students read and decode big words. So technically, that strategy would be a word study strategy, but you can support students using it during your small group time.

So while these examples might be simple, what I hope they highlight for you is that overlap is important and overlap is going to happen. And I think rather than trying to look for ways that you can teach everything separately, I would encourage you to think about, how can I actually maximize this time and try to teach multiple concepts at once. And when we start to think in this way, it becomes less about “Okay, let me check off all of the standards that I have to teach, or all of the components that I have to teach”, and it becomes more about “Okay,what do my students actually need in order to be successful?”. You know, if they’re reading a text, it’s like, okay, what word study strategies do they need? What fluency support do they need? How do they need to be writing about this to show their understanding? So it starts to be more about looking at student outcomes and student results, as opposed to us teaching every little thing in isolation. So not everything has to have its own little time slot on your schedule.

And then my final suggestion, or tip, is to try not to let your schedule become something that is rigid. And what I mean by that is you’re going to create a schedule, you’re going to have it on paper, you’re going to probably have it displayed in your classroom, and a schedule is really meant to be a guide. But what we don’t want is for this to say, okay, every day at this time for the entire year, we’re going to complete the specific task. And that’s not to say that we don’t want to have a structure to our literacy block, or we don’t want to have routines. You guys know that I’m a huge fan of routines, and they save you time, they save you sanity. And so we want to put routines and structure into our literacy block, but we also want to make sure that we have some flexibility so we can make adjustments as the year goes on, to give our students what it is that they need.

So let me give you an example of what this could look like. So we’re going to talk about the word study bucket. Again, word study is such an important part of your literacy block, and there’s so many different word study concepts that we want to cover with our students during the year. But let’s say this summer, as you’re planning out your word study bucket, maybe you’re going to tell yourself, okay, I’m going to use 10 minutes every day to introduce a new morpheme. We’re going to introduce prefixes, suffixes and roots, and every day I’m going to introduce a new one to my students. And that’s how we’re going to use word study for the entire year. So if that’s sort of the only thing you allow yourself to do during your word study block, then you’re going to be missing out on a lot of other word study concepts. So rather than being so rigid with your plan for each bucket, give yourself the flexibility to really give your students what they need. So what that might mean is, is maybe you’re going to spend three weeks where you are introducing new morphemes to your students. But then maybe you’re going to give your students some really hands on exposure, and they’re going to spend some time where they are building words and working on word ladders and word matrices, and they’re really playing around with combining all of the prefixes, suffixes and roots that you’ve taught them to create new words. And then maybe you’re like, Okay, I really want to make sure my students can put this into practice, and so you’re going to start to focus on context clues. And so students are going to be able to use their knowledge of prefixes, suffixes and roots to help determine the meaning of unknown words that they see in context. So your word study instruction is going to shift to where now you’re going to talk about how to use context clues, and you’re going to be looking at word study from that lens. So your Word Study lessons aren’t always looking the same from day-to-day or week-to-week, but your students are still really engaged in meaningful word study practice, and that is helping you make the most of that portion of your literacy block.

So as you get started with the year and you’re putting your schedule together, realize and recognize that as the year goes on, there should be room for some flexibility. What you decide to do on day one with your schedule doesn’t mean that you have to be stuck with that in October or January. And as the year goes on, you want to give yourself that flexibility within the different buckets of your literacy block to make sure that you’re giving your students exactly what they need. And I think along with that, means that you really need to be able to trust yourself, that you know how to set up and structure your time, to support your students in the best way. You have so much content knowledge you can definitely make the right decisions for how to use your time. So keep in mind, your schedule is a guide. It is there to keep you pointed in the right direction, but it doesn’t need to be so rigid.

Okay, so let me just quickly recap three things that you can do to really help create a cohesive schedule this year that can fit in all of these strategies that we’ve talked about over the summer. So first of all, create your literacy block buckets, so that way you have chunks of time that have a specific focus within your literacy block. And then remember that we don’t have to teach everything in isolation, that overlap between our buckets is important. And then just the final reminder, don’t let your schedule become so rigid. Flexibility is definitely key.

Now I hope that this episode, and really all of the episodes in our Stellar Teacher Science of Reading Summer Series, are helping you get excited for this next school year. And then don’t forget, doors to the Stellar Literacy Collective are open this week only. So head to stellarteacher.com/join if you want to learn more or if you want to enroll. And if you are a listener who has joined, send me a message on Instagram, or even reach out to me via email at [email protected] I love knowing which of our podcast listeners are also members, so I would love to hear from you. I hope you have a stellar week, and I will see you back here on Monday.

Thanks so much for joining me today. If you enjoyed today’s episode and are finding value in this podcast, it would mean the world to me if you subscribe and leave a five-star positive review/ This helps me spread the word to more and more teachers, just like you. Don’t forget to join me over on Instagram @thestellarteachercompany. And you can also find links and resources from this episode in the show notes at stellarteacher.com I’ll see you back here next week.