A Book-A-Day...

During the summer holiday I was roaming through Twitter when I came across an image of one of the coolest bulletin boards I had ever seen. A teacher, (Jillian Heise-@heisereads) had made a giant grid on the school wall and filled the grid with book cover images of picture books she read to her class over the year.  One book for every day of school. Below her very amazing image was the hashtag, #bookaday. I knew immediately this was something I wanted to do, so I committed right then and there to creating a similar board. 

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!!

Summer Reading

As a teacher, I generally like to spend the first part of my summer doing some light reading, and I'll be recommending a few good reads to my students as well.  

I recently came across a reading list on Twitter titled "50 Books All Kids Should Read Before They're 12". It's a pretty good list, and it even got me thinking about revisiting some of the books on the list myself.  I've decided this is a good idea because: 

1.  I would like something fun and simple to read as a start to my summer. 

2.  I never read a book the same way twice.  

You can find a link to the the list below.  It could be a good list to recommend to your students, or to look over with your own kids and read a book on the list together. 

Happy summer reading!

https://www.commonsensemedia.org/lists/50-books-all-kids-should-read-before-theyre-12