Change is good...

In case I didn't mention it already, this has been a very busy year for us! But you know what? We've finally got this thing to the point where it is running smoothly...very smoothly. (And by "this thing" I mean The Lit Pit, of course.)

When we started out we were really excited about the activities we had planned for each station. As the kids really got rolling though, we began to see some, um, weaknesses in our plan. Like, as it turns out, no matter how interesting you try to make the activities, intermediate students don't need two word work stations. They just don't. They are quite happy to do one station of sorting and analyzing but two? Too much.

So we rethought it. We thought about what those intermediate kids really need and we came up with Working With Text. This station allows them to examine the text from the guided reading stations in more depth, focusing on whatever skill the classroom teacher and I decided was most in demand at any given time. We've covered main idea, supporting details, purpose and more (can you tell we were reading non-fiction?). I'll go in to more detail about this station and the set-up in another post but suffice it to say it is differentiated (in keeping with the spirit of the Lit Pit as a whole), involves interactive notebooks and is really engaging for the kids. What more could you ask for?

Oh, maybe this - The primary teachers loved this model so much that they adopted it too! Working With Text allows us to address so many literacy needs on so many levels. Probably my favourite change to The Lit Pit so far.