Here’s a visual of a strategy for working with small groups during Independent Work Time at the elementary level.  This works if  you have at least a 20-40 minute block of time to work with students and can spend at least 10 minutes with two groups each day.

The idea is that you meet briefly with your students are lowest in a particular skill every day but you do not ignore students who need enrichment or those who need just a little bit of help to get to the next level.  It’s a mistake to spend much longer than ten minutes with your struggling students as the law of diminishing returns kicks in after awhile.

Let’s assume you’re working on fluency…in ten minutes with your lowest readers you can review sight words, do phonemic awareness activities (such as oral blending and phoneme replacement…change the sound /b/ in bat to /c/ = cat), phonics activities (like the phonemic awareness activities but with letter cards or white boards), AND  read some decodable text.

With your middle and higher students you can work on Reader’s Theater or something like literature circles/book clubs where the group is all reading the same book and you come together to discuss it.

However, this post is more about the management of your IWT/Workshop that I hopes makes it seem possible to both address struggling students and challenge/enrich others.

You will, of course, need to adapt the timing to the size of your class and groups.  Also note that you don’t want to keep the same students in the same groups all the time, their grouping depends on the skill that you’re working on at the time.