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
Knitting, Independence, and Small Group Routines for Intermediate Readers
A few years ago, my teenage daughter mentioned that she would like to learn to knit. I told her that I could teach her and that we should start with...
Books that Invite Student Participation
When I taught first grade years ago, my students had a rousing good time with text that invited them to join in. Even before they were actually reading the text,...
Books We Love: Building a Reading Community
As the year comes to an end it feels natural to celebrate the books we've loved. In previous years, I invited my students to list their favorite books on a...
How Can School and Classroom Libraries Support Struggling Readers?
In her article Room for Beliefs, Debbie Miller says, "Step outside your classroom door and look back in, as if for the first time. What do you see? Do you want...
Making Time for Nonfiction Read Alouds
As an elementary teacher, it is so easy to find great fiction texts to read aloud to students. There are many books to choose from, and I can readily envision...
If You Like Captain Underpants: Related Books for Students (BOOKLIST)
I have found that there is often one book that hooks a child on reading. Children may know how to read other books, they read other books . . ....
Literacy Builds Community: The Jackdaw Project
To quote a former principal of mine, "School is not summer camp." This phrase kept playing over and over in my mind as I began thinking about the beginning of...
Making Time for Play
Five-year-old Kennedy started kindergarten this fall. She has regaled me with stories of the other kindergartners' antics, her favorite offerings from the school cafeteria, her teacher's read aloud book choices,...
Fairy Tales for Middle Grade Readers (BOOKLIST)
Fantasy is becoming quite a popular genre with middle grade and middle school readers. Even though I am not a huge reader of fantasy, I am a fan of fairy...
Using Poetry to Promote Reading Fluency
Poetry invites rereading. Because poems tend to be short and to the point, children enjoy poetry much more than we may think. Old Elm Speaks by Kristine O'Connell George is...
Making Book Logs Purposeful for Students
Recently we have been hearing from teachers about their concerns over the effectiveness of book logs. Teachers are finding that they constantly have to remind students to record their reading....
Aligning Curriculum with Struggling Readers in Mind
Years ago in a workshop, Shelley Harwayne asked us to think about how many books our struggling readers were reading on any given day. When you think about struggling readers,...
Hallmarks of Reading Workshop
One of the many things we value at our school is ensuring that the experiences students have in workshops are authentic. Part of the process of coming to common understandings...
The Luxury of Extra Reading Time Over the Holidays
I love thinking ahead to holiday reading. The books seem to pile up all fall with hopes that over vacation, I'll find long periods of time to read and to...
Rethinking Reading at Home
We struggle every year with the question of whether to have students fill out logs for the reading they do at home. On one hand, we want students to read...
Overcoming Tears and Fears: Developing Criteria for Flexible Groups
It was a rainy Friday morning and time to clean up and share after what I thought felt like a productive writing workshop. My students slowly began to tuck away...
Why and Watch Me: Making the Abstract Concrete for Readers
Recently Tammy visited New Mexico and had the opportunity to hike the Petroglyph National Monument. It was amazing to see that even thousands of years ago literacy was alive and...
Letters in the Middle School Classroom
I began my first year of teaching at a middle school this year. However, although I was trained in a program that focused on secondary education, it was the words...
Books for Phonics Instruction – Accomplishing More Than Just Sounding Out Words
"Do you want me to read you a book?" I looked up and found myself face-to-face with Lemekia, a first-grade girl with a big smile and a head full of...
Letting Students Define and Design My 6th Grade Classroom Library
I started out last fall with all my classroom library books organized alphabetically by author. I figured since the libraries do it that way, it would be great practice for...
Selecting Texts for Strategy Teaching with English Language Learners in Mind
Over the past several months we have spent time thinking and teaching with a group of educators whose students are predominantly English language learners (ELLs). During our visits to their...
