Literacy Workshop Process

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Thirty-two million adults in the United States can’t read. This is 14% of our population. As an educator, I find this to be as inexcusable as neglect and abuse. According to a study conducted in April 2013 by the U.S. Department of Education and the National Institute of literacy, 21 % of adults in the U.S. read below a 5th grade level, and 19 % of high school graduates can’t read” ( July 21, 2014 retrieved from www.huffingtonpost.com). How can one of the wealthiest and most influential country allows its citizens to be illiterate? But more importantly, how do we correct this? We must be diligent in our approach to teaching literacy with research based, well thought out methods, such as the reading process taught to us during the recent Lesley Summer Literacy Institute. I am a kindergarten teacher at a Title I school in Concord, New Hampshire. My district does use the Literacy Workshop process developed by Irene Fountas and Gay Pinnell. I decided to take this class to improve my technique of this method. I did not expect to come away from this workshop with such an immense passion and a deeper understanding for this method of literacy instruction. I, like many primary teachers, am at the forefront of this battle against adult illiteracy. In my class, as in any literacy class, assessment has to be the first step. Fountas and Pinnell (2006) states, “you cannot teach effectively without …show more content…

But we in the United States have the financial means and intellectual means to improve, if not to erase, the illiteracy rate. We can do this by maintaining a high standard in literacy instruction. Using the Readers Workshop format throughout the grades will be a starting point to create a new society of fluid readers. Methods like Readers Workshop lend itself to developing a culture of not only competent readers, but readers who love to

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