Tag: reading

Hosting a Book Giveaway to Encourage Reading At Home

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I don’t know about you, but my number one goal for my students is for my students to love reading as much as I do. Giving them time to read anything of choice in the classroom was made a priority this year, but making sure they continue that at home is a whole different challenge. So, to encourage my students to continue reading while at home while doing this distance learning thing, I’m hosting a book giveaway.

Here’s how it works. Each week, I’m sharing book suggestions with my classes through my parent communication tool. I’m using Class Dojo, but you could easily share through other communication apps, email, or digital meeting tools like Zoom or Google apps. I send a photo of the book I’m suggesting with a quick summary. I usually send two or three of these per week, to give some options, trying to vary my suggestions by what I know my students enjoy reading and to meet all of my students’ different interests.

What the students do in return, is send pictures of themselves reading (or their parents do) anything they have (magazines, recipes, books from home, ebooks, etc.) while at home. Each picture sent gets their name in the drawing. They can also send a new picture each day to get in the drawing multiple times for that week.

At the end of the week, I draw a name out of the jar and that student can choose one of the books that I’ve sent out as suggestions to receive as a reward. All I do is order it on Amazon for them and have it sent to their address. It’s easy, not that expensive at one book per week, and highly motivating! (Also, although I haven’t looked into this, I’m sure you could get donations to help with the cost of sending books to your students to make this even easier for you.)

Inspiring Positive Character: A Reading Response Bulletin Board or Research Board

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I created this reading response and interactive bulletin board to integrate my two passions, social emotional learning and reading instruction. I’m a strong believer in allowing students free choice of their independent reading, but sometimes it can be hard to plan assignments that keep students accountable for that reading if you don’t know what they will be reading. I have found that this is a reading response that all of my students can do no matter what their book choice may be, and it is just enough of a response that I can monitor their comprehension of that reading.

In my opinion, any time is a good time to have your students thinking about positive character traits. You could choose to use this as an ongoing, year-long, reading response activity, or as a Black History Month or Women’s History Month activity to celebrate inspirational change leaders in history. Because of this flexibility, this reading response could be used as a quick research project, or with any independent reading choice, fiction or nonfiction, during your students’ daily independent reading time.

Another option to note is that you can do this a couple different ways. You could focus on one character trait at a time, a few, or all at once. I take time to introduce all of the character traits with my students. Then, as they are reading and come across an inspirational example or story (from nonfiction or fiction), they can choose the trait paper that best fits the example they want to share. You could set an expectation for a certain number of responses per week, or leave it open-ended.

My favorite way to store all of the writing page choices for the bulletin board is in a large 3-ring binder, with dividers for each trait. I use the cover page of this file as the binder cover page. You may choose to display their responses using the bulletin board option, in a binder for students to review and check out, or just as an assignment your students turn in to you. Students could also keep their writing and share it in a daily response journal that they keep as a record of the characters they read about throughout the year. Really, there are so many possibilities 🙂

I’d love for you to try it out! You can grab it by clicking on the link here to start using in your own classroom.

Creative Reading Review

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This review project is a favorite in my class!  I was looking for a way to assess my students’ fictional comprehension of ALL of the skills I teach in our fiction unit. The problem with assessments, though, is that they aren’t always fair to all students. You reading teachers know what I mean! We differentiate our instruction to make learning fair for all of our readers, so assessments should also be fair! With this project, I can assign leveled text, individually or by group, allowing me to actually assess their comprehension skills without questioning if the real problem was that they couldn’t read the passage. As the teacher, you can even choose whether you assign the pages with graphic organizers or blank pages for students who need more of a challenge.

While working on this project, my students are given free rein, meaning they are completely in control of how they show their understanding. Text dependence is easy too. With digital text, students can take a snapshot or copy/paste exactly what they need to prove their thinking. Altogether, I’m assessing their understanding, giving my students opportunities to use creativity, critical thinking skills, and their communication skills. If not being used for assessment purposes, it also makes for a great collaboration project for group assignments.

If you want to check this out for your own students click the link below.

Fiction Book Analysis Project

Eight Beach-Themed Genre and ABC Order Activities

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Every year I wonder how I could make my reading genres unit more engaging.  I’ve tried book tastings, a powerpoint with notes, concentration games, videos, and it goes on and on.  My students never fully master this unit and I know that it’s my fault.  So … when it was time to plan the unit this year, I knew I needed more exciting and active learning.  These eight beach-themed genre activities and ABC order activities include ideas for beach volley(genre)ball, a cornhole game, building a sandcastle, and saving the baby beach crabs!  When I showed up in a lei and pineapple sunglasses, playing hula music in the background, I’m pretty sure the students thought I was crazy.  As the learning activities progressed they were so involved and excited about what they were learning, that they asked to do it again the next day!  Even more, I had students from other classes asking about what we were doing in our room!  They wanted to join us!

And you know what, my students know their reading genres! Learning was fun and effective!  Click here to get all of these fun activities and take your students back to the beach!

thanks for reading!

Flight School: A Reading Research-Based STEAM Lesson and Digital Task Journal

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Flight School STEAM

I’m super excited to share this lesson!  I love STEAM projects and shared my digital task journal to make STEAM more reading and research-based so that it fits better into the Reading and Language Arts classroom in an earlier post.  This is the lesson that I used to first implement this idea and it worked SO WELL!   This lesson includes a Growth Mindset read aloud and discussion, task journal prompts that require the students to be text dependent, reflective, and to apply the information they learn from their research, and to use that information to analyze their own success or lack of success throughout the STEAM process.  This is totally higher level thinking!  I was able to find texts that ALL of my students could read (in a 4th grade classroom with reading levels ranging between two grade levels) and I was even able to find research passages that still allowed me to assess comprehension skills we were working on and incorporate the STEAM project into my reading groups to continue working on close reading skills.  Suggestions and links for research texts are included in the lesson.  This is what reading SHOULD BE!  I’ll be working on more of these lessons to continue incorporating STEAM into the reading classroom and can’t wait to share them!

To get my Flight School reading STEAM lesson and task journal, click here.

thanks for reading!