Workshop capstone: your reading portfolio
Ākonga assemble the year's evidence and argue, from it, how their reading has changed.
- Reading Workshop move: Portfolio with an evidence-backed claim about own growth
- Evidence it produces: A growth claim citing at least two pieces of own work
Route status: the learning intentions and mini-lesson scaffold are shared with the seminar route; the Do Now, activities, conferences, evidence and exit below are this route’s own. The difference is how ākonga work — their own chosen texts, individual evidence, and one-to-one conferencing — not which strategies are taught.
Lesson 10: Year 7 Foundational Reading Capstone Portfolio & Reflection
Building confident, active readers through Te Ao Māori perspectives, comprehension strategies, and rich Aotearoa texts.
🎯 Ngā Whāinga Akoranga | Learning Intentions
Comprehensive synthesis of Year 7 reading strategies: predicting, context decoding, main ideas, inferencing, text structures, pūrākau analysis, bias detection, and synthesis.
Assemble complete Year 7 Reading Journal, conduct independent close reading of a novel Aotearoa text, and present reading portfolio reflection.
⚡ Whakaoho | Do Now: Reread yourself (8 mins)
Open your Reading Journal and reread your own Sections 1–9. You are the text today. As you skim, mark the three entries you think show your strongest reading work — not your neatest pages, your strongest evidence.
🗂️ Activity 1: Assemble the portfolio (22 mins)
Build your reading portfolio: your three chosen entries (each showing a different strategy), flagged and briefly annotated — why this one is evidence of that strategy working on my text. Then write the reflection that fronts the portfolio: which strategy most changed how you read your own books this unit, with a before-and-after example from your journal.
This portfolio is built entirely from your own texts and your own entries — that is the Workshop’s claim: reading volume, choice, and evidence you own.
🪑 While they work: reading conferences (run through Activity 1 mins)
Confer one-to-one with every learner gets a closing conference this lesson, even if brief — schedule across the period and use the portfolio as the agenda. Keep each conference under four minutes and record one line per learner on your conference sheet: text, strategy seen, next move. Everyone else keeps working — the conference is a conversation about their book, not a test.
Conference questions for this lesson:
- Which entry is your best evidence, and what exactly does it prove?
- Read me your before-and-after example. What actually changed?
- What will you do differently with the next book you choose — and what will you choose?
📝 Activity 2: The recommendation (15 mins)
Write a reading recommendation: pitch the best text you read this unit to a specific classmate (named), using what you know about them as a reader — and back the pitch with one strategy-informed reason (“the inferencing work pays off in chapter three” beats “it’s really good”).
🚪 Exit (5 mins)
Portfolio submitted, best-evidence entry flagged, recommendation delivered to its named reader.
🏫 Kaiako Planning & Pedagogy Notes
Curriculum alignment: Te Mātaiaho, English, Phase 3 (Years 7–8). This lesson builds comprehension, critical literacy and cultural connectedness through Aotearoa literature and pūrākau. The unit's one verified Te Mātaiaho anchor is recorded on the curriculum companion; no further statement is claimed for this lesson until one is verified.