You'd think reading one book a day to students would be easy, but in actuality, a fair bit of thought has to go into it. Where do I start? What do I focus on for those very crazy first few weeks? What are the messages I hope to share? What are "good books" I could use.
I was lucky in the sense that I started the year by introducing Daily 5. I knew it was possible for our class to take up to nearly a whole month to become comfortable with the processes and follow expectations, so we spent a significant chunk of September learning the CAFE Menu, and practicing a small handful of reading strategies. Luckily, there are many suggested books on the Daily Cafe website for teaching reading strategies, so that was a great place to start. I also had a good look through our school and public libraries, I read "Writing Power" by Adrienne Gear which had great suggestions for anchor books for writing, and, as is often the case, the Internet was a great source. I used Twitter and simply followed the hashtags. I mentioned #bookaday, but I also stumbled across #classroombookaday and #nerdybookclub, which are all really good sources for finding books. I also simply went on Amazon and let my mouse take me away!
So far, our Book-A-Day board has been a success. My students are looking forward to seeing the board fill up over the year, and are quick to remind me when I haven't put up the image of "yesterday's book".
On the book cover images I have added the strategy or lesson the book is related to.
We began the year with letter writing and I used several books to anchor the format for writing letters, and to provide students with lots of examples. The books we used for this were "Dear Mrs. LaRue: Letters From Obedience School",
"I Wanna Iguana", and "Dear Mr. Blueberry".
I'm also looking forward to having our Book-A-Day Board fill up as the year progresses. If you have any suggestions for anchor books that can be used for reading or writing, I'd be happy to have them!!
