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
Exploring Goals in Fiction
Gigi McAllister meets with a group of fourth-grade girls who are all using picture books to explore larger themes or the goals of the main characters.
Research Through Picture Books
“Mrs. S, I can’t find anything in this book. Can I just use the iPad?” Blake closed his book in frustration. This is an all-too-common refrain in my classroom during...
“Old Age Sticks”: Choral Reading and Reflection
Christy Rush-Levine leads her eighth graders in a choral reading and analysis of the E. E. Cummings poem "Old Age Sticks." This is the second video in a two-part series....
Good Questions for Group Discussions
Gigi McAllister helps a group of fourth graders evaluate questions for fostering good group discussions.
Literacy Routines for Applying See-Think-Wonder
What do you see? What do you think about that? What does it make you wonder? Debbie, Paula, and Sylvia are doing a book study with Making Thinking Visible: How...
Increasing Read Alouds in the Primary Grades
Years ago, I was sitting in a workshop led by Debbie Miller as she talked about the importance of reading aloud to students. Of course I already knew the importance...
Read-Aloud Gone Awry
Some years back, I was reading a book aloud to my seventh graders. We weren’t yet to the halfway point, and I was happily enjoying the whole thing—I loved the...
Fact or Fiction? Introducing the Task
For years I have taught my middle school students the mnemonic Nonfiction Is Not Fake and Fiction Is Fake. The idea of the trick is to help students distinguish which...
Fact or Fiction? Discussion
Christy Rush-Levine has her middle school students complete a fun and sophisticated reading activity using Muse magazine to sort through what might be fact or fiction. In this second installment...
Rhyming Words and English Language Learners
I don’t understand . . . Luis just can’t rhyme, and we’ve been practicing rhymes for weeks. You would think that he would’ve gotten it by now. Right? What am...
Free Range Learning with Nonfiction (Part 1)
I have always been a nonfiction lover. Even in the early 1970s before the children’s book industry embraced informational texts for children, I loved reading about my world. Fact lists...
In Search of Just-Right Reading Spots
Think about your favorite reading spot. Maybe it’s the lounge chair by the window, the recliner in the den, or the rocking chair on the porch. Whatever and wherever it...
Building Better Book Baggies
The sound of giggles distracted me from the guided reading lesson that I was watching. I saw Kimora and Janya, partially shielded from view, huddled together in a corner of...
Celebrating Completed Books and Presenting New Ones
Gigi McAllister shares a quick daily routine of asking students to celebrate books they have finished reading before she introduces a new book to her fourth-grade class.
Student (and Teacher) Risk-Taking
In my school district there is a focus on risk-taking for teachers. What does that mean? Essentially, not to be afraid to try something new and perhaps even totally different...
Using Paired Texts with Beginning Readers
“Have you seen my cat?” read Chloe, a kindergartner, purposefully pointing to each word as she read it. “Wow!” said Bridget, Chloe’s surprised teacher. “How did you know what that...
Book Talk: Boy21
Christy Rush-Levine previews Boy21 with her seventh-grade students.
Creating a Culture of Book Love
Readers are made, not born. Few students spring out of the ground fully formed as readers. They need help, and we cannot assume that they will get it from home,...
No More Strong Girls?
“Why does every heroine have to be a Katniss?" asked Laini Taylor, author of Strange the Dreamer. “Aren’t there other ways for girls to be worthy role models without shooting...
Picture Walks for Comprehension: Conferring with Dylan
Katrina Edwards confers with first grader Dylan, teaching this young English language learner the value of picture walks for comprehension.
The Power of Group Conferences in Fifth Grade
A few years ago I read Donalyn Miller’s Reading in the Wild and was struck by two of her “traits” of wild readers: readers have plans, and readers talk to...
