Choice Lit Topic: Teaching Reading
Our contributors lead reading workshops in classrooms with creative flair. Over the past 12 years, we’ve filled our site with loads of suggestions, tools, and tips for using engaging books throughout the curriculum to hook kids on reading. Here is where you will find many stories of successful and not-so-successful workshop days, and what we learned from them. We bring these stories to life through hundreds of video examples.
Results
Tips for Navigating a Scripted Literacy Program
Boxes and boxes and boxes arrived in August. I unpacked and unpacked and unpacked. I reorganized manuals, magazines, and small group books by unit in cardboard boxes and set them...
From Meet-Cutes to Happily-Ever-Afters: A Romance Genre Study
This year one of my classes had a distinct reading personality. Nearly all the students were romance readers. This is not a genre I am personally drawn to, but after...
Making the Case for Reading
The word just has really begun to get on my nerves. When an administrator asks about scheduling a walk-through and asks, “Will you just be reading at the beginning of...
Latest and Greatest Ways to Show Independent Reading Is Valued
Tara was recently moving her daughter's bedroom from downstairs, where she’s been for many years, to an upstairs bedroom. Although the room she moved to is larger, she wasn’t able...
Talking Back: A Strategy for Annotation
We should think of marginalia as a genre, or so Roy Peter Clark suggests in his 2024 book How to Write Short. The purpose of marginalia, he says, is “learning,...
Hidden Lessons: Why Do Relationships Matter? (Part 3)
By the time they reach high school, many students have learned how to survive change, but not always how to make sense of it. They’ve lost friendships, switched schools, experienced...
Wheels: Adapting to Change on the Roller Derby Track and in Your Teaching Life
In roller derby, wheels are an important part of the game. Skaters change their wheels based on how much stick or slide they want as they play, adjusting for different...
Walking a Teaching-Readers Tightrope: Finding Balance Between Beliefs and Expectations
The history of teaching reading is often explained through the metaphor of a pendulum, swinging drastically from one side to the other, never stopping between. Educators are pulled along for...
Books Are My Management Strategy
Books are my management system. For a decade, I worked to build a community of readers. No matter their level, their mindset, or their skill set, they were readers. The...
Nonfiction Books for Compassion, Inspiration, and Heart
My class recently did a Mock Caldecott project, and I was surprised by how much I had been missing in the book publishing world. I discovered new authors and illustrators....
Five Things I’ve Used AI for This Week
My mom slid into the passenger seat of my car and shut her door. “Thanks for driving me to the eye doctor, honey,” she said as she handed me a...
The Influence of the Classroom Library
The purple crayon moved across the screen and a new world emerged. As my kids and I watched Harold and the Purple Crayon in the movie theater, I wore a...
Helping Kids Lead Every Day: How to Deepen Small-Group Discussions
Now that students knew how to get their materials, decide what to read, and how to read, it was time to lift the level of their thinking in their student-led...
Now What? We Went on a Field Trip
Field trip. Those two words can get very opposite reactions when brought up in a conversation with teachers. There are teachers who love going on field trips and those who...
Expecting Joy in the Classroom Library
Bitsy Parks shares the joy you can expect from the classroom library.
Meaning Makers
A preschooler picks up a book new to her, Pizza for Pia. The book was intended for her older sister. She looks at the cover as I read the title....
Zooming In and Stepping Back
Whether you call it close reading, passage analysis, or something else, zooming in on a scene in a larger work is a staple of instruction in many language arts classes,...
Literary Salons: Book Clubs, Elevated
I usually do a round of book clubs with my students, but this year so many of them were in a good groove with their independent reading that I was...
Pick One: How to Establish a Community of Readers
“What do we do when we’re done?” A preK friend looks up at me with wide eyes. My school has something called “step-up day” when the students who will be...
Reclaiming Space: Weeding to Grow a Healthy Library
It’s a slow summer morning. I just finished a short walk, and now I am working in my backyard on the vegetable garden and flowerpots on the deck. I pull...
You Know How to Show Them
“I sent you all the kids who hate books, Becca…They're terrified of the idea of reading…but you know how to show them.” We were sitting at lunch on the last...
