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
Four Keys to Making Workshop Work
“I don’t know what workshop is. We haven’t talked about that in my schooling,” the teachers said to me. We were having a conversation about the upcoming sessions these teachers...
One Instructional Strategy Changes a Reading Community: Status of the Class
Each year there’s a point when independent reading book selection goes on autopilot. Depending on the year and the community of readers, it can happen anytime during the second quarter....
Making Time to Listen to Your Readers
The school schedule: the holy grail of school life. Without the school schedule . . . nothing happens. It is planned to the minute, and following it becomes a teacher’s...
Three Meaningful Ways to Incorporate Drawing into English Class
When students enter my high school English classroom and see the bins of colored pencils and markers out, many of them are excited, but there are always a few who...
Four Tools for Hosting Online Book Clubs
Before the pandemic, there were some common technology integrations in literacy classrooms. Learning management systems, like Google Classroom and Seesaw, were becoming ubiquitous for teachers to post assignments and collect...
Finding Reliable Digital Reading Resources
One of the things I love about education is that it is always evolving. When tablets first became the rage years ago, I looked for ways to incorporate them into...
Offering Playful Choice to Show Learning
It all started when one first grader complained, “Mrs. Mulligan, I don’t want to talk with my book club. It’s boring.” Then several others chimed in, “Yeah, it’s boring.” Hearing...
Sensible Reasons to Use Student Reading Records
Several years ago I started a Goodreads account to keep track of the books I read. Creating my own personal shelves allowed me to track books from genres, topics, and...
Fairy Tale Study that Needed a Restart
Each year, I remember when I returned to teaching second grade. I was overwhelmed by learning new standards and content. One of our literacy standards asks us to compare and...
Yoga Poses and Workshop Processes: Honor the Journey
It’s still dark outside when I descend the stairs, careful not to wake my sleeping children with sounds of creaky floorboards. When I arrive at the mat, I cross my...
Finding a Way to Make Heterogeneous Grouping a Reality
The key to ending racism and racist acts of violence within our society is to examine what is taking place in our classrooms. —Tauheedah Baker, Doctor of Education Leadership, Harvard...
Making Connections with Sociograms
My 11th-grade English class had just spent the week reading John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men aloud. We had just returned from hybrid instruction, and it was one of the...
COVID Silver Linings: Positive Changes in Teaching Practices
Whether you're teaching remotely or in a socially distanced classroom (or some combination of the two), no doubt you have made substantial changes to your teaching practice this school year....
Multiple Perspectives Cultivate Empathy
Empathy is the highest form of intelligence. —Anthony Gucciardi Emotions are the gatekeepers to learning, and empathy opens the way for students to invest in and care about others. This...
When a Library Whispers
During the day, my classroom is active and lively with lots of reading and writing and sharing and learning. When the students go home and I am by myself, the...
Build Reader Identity
Maggie was in first grade when I began to work with her in reading support. In those beginning days, she sat beside me at the table as I tried to...
Nurturing Lifelong Readers
The Gift of Reading For as long as I can remember, I have been surrounded by books. Throughout my childhood, my grandmother gifted me picture books that remain part of...
What Do Readers Need?
What do you need? It is such a simple question. A friend recently shared that her therapist suggested she teach the people close to her to ask her this question...
Tips for Creating Shared-Writing Texts Online
Let’s face it: When we work with emergent readers online, it is hard to get enough texts into their hands. Yes, we can use online texts from Rivet.com or other...
Class Books Build Readers, Writers, and Community
During morning arrival a student came up to me and shared that her family had gotten a new cat over the weekend. I responded with the excitement that a new...
Rethinking “Finding” the Central Idea
I have often told my students that teachers don’t always have all the answers and that sometimes when teachers listen to students, we become the learners. When I told my students...
