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
Middle School Book Clubs: Introduction
Book clubs are a natural fit in middle school classrooms. They are a great way to incorporate more reading into the lives of our students, and to encourage...
Fresh Books and Age-old Skills
Habits are at first cobwebs, then cables. Spanish Proverb Getting stuck in a rut is easy because making a change is difficult. Take the story of my kitchen clock and...
Middle School Book Clubs: Response Options
Perhaps the most important part of my role as teacher during book clubs is to know what my students are thinking. This is the whole point, to know that they...
Preschool Centers
Centers can be an effective teaching and learning strategy in preschools. In this video, Melissa Kolb shares her rationale for using centers in her Head Start classroom with video examples...
Fluency in Focus: Conferring with Jake
Gail Boushey confers with Jake, a seven-year-old who is setting a reading goal of developing fluency. After the conference, she debriefs with Joan Moser.
I Can’t Quite Put My Finger On It
Have you ever been working with a teacher and they start to tell you about a new strategy or "program" you are not familiar with, but the description you are...
Middle School Book Clubs in Action
Katie Doherty talks about the links between strategy lessons and book club work in her 6th grade classroom. Katie also sits in on a book club discussion.
Book Matchmaker: “Cool” Books for a Struggling Second Grader
Peggy asked me to help her find books for a second grader. The student is struggling, but still wants to read the kinds of books her friends are...
The Sponge Summary Lesson Part 5
This is a companion video series to Heather Rader's article "A Sponge is a Summary." In this sequence of videos, Heather teaches a 4th grade class, using the analogy of...
Tried and True Trumps Shiny and New
My son, Mitchell, adores the idea of getting something new. "Please!" he begs, "Can we go to the toy store?" He believes there must be a toy out there that...
Words and Images: Mentor Texts for Second Grade Boys
In this conference with two of her second-grade students, Linda Karamatic shares mentor texts and tips to help them with their writing. Both boys are writing stories with strong visual...
The Sponge Summary Lesson Part 6
This is a companion video series to Heather Rader's article "A Sponge is a Summary." In this sequence of videos, Heather teaches a 4th grade class, using the analogy of...
Conferring with Tweens: Boys and Series Books
In this conference from a 6th grade classroom, Katie Doherty confers with a boy who is reading a book from a series she is unfamiliar with, Bec which is Book...
Guiding Reading Partners: Work on Accuracy
In this reading conference from a 2nd grade classroom, Linda Karamatic pairs two children who have similar needs in reading.
Frogs as Learning Ambassadors Part 1: Literary Nonfiction in 4th Grade
There is a story behind the following video clips captured in my classroom. The research and writing lessons filmed that day were built upon experiences that launched the school year...
Rumor Has It
This April, let's talk about people; let's start some rumors. Let's talk about characters and authors we know to people who have no clue who they are. Let's step out...
Narrative Nonfiction in 5th Grade Part 2
In this lesson from a 5th grade classroom, Aimee Buckner guides students in a note-taking process to help understand the qualities of nonfiction narrative writing. In this second part of...
Nonfiction Read Aloud
Sean Moore reads nonfiction aloud to his second-grade students. This is the first video in a two-part series: Here are some tips for nonfiction read-alouds, based on Sean...
Nonfiction Read Aloud – Part 2
Here are some more tips for nonfiction read-alouds, based on Sean Moore's reading of Plants That Eat Animals: 1. Use nonverbal cues to focus students. Sean uses quick...
Astrigs, Asterisks, and Letting Students Lead
In this video from Linda Karamatic's second-grade classroom, Charlie shares his punctuation "find" of asterisks with his classmates. He is reading the book Miss Child Has Gone Wild by Dan...
Book Matchmaker: Global Citizenship and Social Responsibility
When I thought about the idea of citizenship and all that could be learned about such an important topic with young readers, I wanted to share some books that...
