This year I decided to try something new. I thought there was a need for students to hear their peers talk about reading. I had noticed that students would read during assigned times but didn’t always carry their reading out into their lives. I had noticed that the students I supported didn’t easily talk about books and hadn’t discovered all that reading had to offer them.
After talking with colleagues, I decided to try putting together a cross-grade-level group of students who would help build excitement around books for our students. My hope was to create a community of readers for our students in which they talked about books without teacher voices in the middle. My hope was to open the door for students to build a culture of reading in our building. I envisioned that students would carry these book conversations and relationships into their time after school and between soccer practices. I imagined genuine book conversations in morning meetings, hallway chats, and discussions across cafeteria tables. My hope was that this group could inspire others to carry their reading habits beyond the school day, after the school year, and into the summer.
For these reasons I decided to select a group of students to help ignite a love of reading in our school community. I created an application, students applied, and then I began to choose the team of ambassadors. I was careful to talk about it in places where students would see it instead of sending it home to parents. I wanted students who wanted to be there. I wanted students who wanted to lead and had made this decision on their own. I wanted students with initiative and drive.
My plan was to choose a group of students who ranged from die-hard, I-can’t-put-this-book-down readers to those who might need a little help along the path. I wanted the most talented and those in search of opportunity. To help spread our message, I knew I wanted one ambassador to represent each classroom. Additionally, I wanted each grade-level team to be a diverse mix of readers. Our group would meet twice a month to talk about books and make plans for our building.
Getting Started
After reading ambassadors were selected, I really wasn’t sure what I was going to do. Being in a reading support position, I still craved community. I still wanted to work with students. Believing reading isn’t just about learning to read but is also about connecting to a community, I decided to put together a group of students who could do this work in their classrooms. Helping students connect with one another as readers meant that as a teacher, I needed to get out of the way and turn some of the work over to them.
I’m not going to lie. I was a bit nervous when the selected ambassadors arrived for our first meeting. What were we going to do? I started in the best way I knew: reading. That became our routine. Each meeting we began with 10–15 minutes of reading as students arrived from their classrooms, from safety patrol, from Choose to Lead, and from other after-school commitments.
At our first meeting I looked at them and said honestly, “I’m so excited to have each of you here. We’re going to talk about books. A lot. We’re going to share the love of reading with our friends in the building. I’m not sure how it is going to look. What do you think a reading ambassador might do?” Truthfully, I was grasping at straws, but luckily, I had selected the magical straw.
I paused.
Waited.
Waited a little longer.
Finally a sweet, quiet, shy fifth grader looked up from the book cover she had been staring down at for quite some time. “Maybe we could write summaries and book reviews,” she offered.
From there the ideas popcorned from student to student:
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We could make a bulletin board for book recommendations.
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We could blog about books with the friends from our sister school. (Yep, that suggestion started an ambassador group across the path.)
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We could have time to read.
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We could preview new books and share them with our classes.
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We could have a book exchange.
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We could read a book together and talk about it.
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We could make book posters.
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We could select favorites to be displayed in the media center.
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We could share ideas for reading on the news.
Their ideas were better than anything I had imagined or considered. Best of all, they owned them. From that day forward I never worried. We met twice a month. Our meetings always began with quiet reading, and then we went around the circle to talk about our books with our friends. They loved this share time, and never allowed me to skip it. The rest of our meeting was spent making plans and doing the work needed to grow book conversations in our school. Sometimes we worked together. Sometimes we split into groups. Older students led younger students. Younger students were never afraid to offer new ideas.
Across the school year, our group hosted March Book Madness for our community and followed it with a little of our own Poetry Madness. (We selected 16 poetry titles that would compete for our building’s favorite poetry book.) We shared information about books with our classes, helped tell students about book events happening in the media center, studied Caldecott and Newbery award books with our media specialist, and created newscasts for our school news team.
When the school year ended, we celebrated our accomplishments, talked about books, and planned our summer reading.
“Will we have ambassadors next year?” the students asked.
“Will I get to be an ambassador again?” they wanted to know.
I would do this work again in a second. Across the year I was continually surprised by the initiative these students, many of them introverts, took in this small-group setting. The students really supported one another and led the work we did. They were the perfect liaisons for their peers. I know our work will continue to grow, and I can no longer imagine a community without reading ambassadors.
