Anchors' Away! Reflecting on Anchor Charts
Recently I've been thinking about my anchor charts for Reading Workshop as we near the end of the school year. I confess, I am not an expert on making anchor charts. I don't have the neatest handwriting, and for sure I cannot draw (and my students let me know it!) but what I do know is that having anchor charts that are meaningful and helpful are essential to the workshop model, since students use them as reference as they read and write. What I did the past two years was create small charts on regular printer paper (8.5 x 11) first, and then transfer it over to larger poster paper in class. It helped me with my planning to make them while my mini-lesson was fresh in my mind. Along the way I encountered a few things: I color coded certain parts of the chart for different pieces of information I started to use second person "you" and then transferred over to first-person "I" midway. This led me to go back and recreate the anchor charts to match the first