Engaged, Dutiful, or Pretend Readers

Today we did one of my favorite lessons....3 Kinds of Readers:  Engaged, Dutiful, or Pretend Reader lesson.  It is amazing how the reading environment changes after this lesson.  Why I waited until January to pull it out, I don't know!  I start out by showing kids pictures of people reading and attach the words dutiful, engaged, and pretend to the pictures as we look at them.  Then I choose three students and send them into the hall.  They decide which reader they want to be and return to class.  The rest of us watch and study them, to see who is who.  We repeat this process a few times....they don't get tired of it!  Then we start our first session of Reader's Workshop....no one (seriously, not one student) is off task.  They are too afraid of being accused of pretending.

Here are some pictures with class justifications for how the studied and labeled each reader.

Pretend-just flipping pages of book...not really reading
Dutiful-doing the right thing at the right time
Engaged-got a smile on her face, she is "with" the book

Engaged-ignoring the distracted person next to her, finger is following words
Pretend-daydreaming...staring off into space....seems to be on title page
Dutiful-kept reading, but would turn to check out what neighbor was doing

Pretend-not sure what he is doing with book
Dutiful-reading, but kept moving around
Engaged-was laughing out loud at something from the story

Lovely lesson....I even made it through a good chunk of my running records!
If you want, you can check out last year's post about this same lesson here.  I forgot to take pictures of the chart we made.

Happy Thursday,