I’m going to finish up this loooong series on genre study with a few short posts. This one is simple: Year long genre study promotes problem solving in your reading workshop. Almost every reading teacher teaches genre, but we don’t always teach genre for all it’s worth. Sometimes we do this: We set up a bulletin board, download some genre anchor charts, go over the charts with students, and ask them to identify genre here-and-there throughout the year. This approach helps students identify genre, but it doesn’t do much else. Their understanding of genre will remain superficial. If they do a lot of reading, their understanding of genre will deepen,…
