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
Read-Aloud Annotations: Google Docs for Questions
In this video series, Franki Sibberson's fifth graders share their strategies for annotating the class read-aloud, The Girl Who Drank the Moon. Students have their choice of using notebooks or...
Read-Aloud Annotations: Expectation and Reality
In this video series, Franki Sibberson's fifth graders share their strategies for annotating the class read-aloud, The Girl Who Drank the Moon. Students have their choice of using notebooks or...
Read Aloud Annotations: Using Google Slides to Focus
In this video series, Franki Sibberson's fifth graders share their strategies for annotating the class read-aloud The Girl Who Drank the Moon. Students have their choice of using notebooks or...
Read-Aloud Annotations: Thoughts to Themes
In this video series, Franki Sibberson's fifth graders share their strategies for annotating the class read-aloud, The Girl Who Drank the Moon. Students have their choice of using notebooks or...
Read Aloud Annotations: Predictions
In this video series, Franki Sibberson's fifth graders share their strategies for annotating the class read aloud, The Girl Who Drank the Moon. Students have their choice of using notebooks...
Read Aloud Annotations: Characters and Intentions
In this video series, Franki Sibberson's fifth graders share their strategies for annotating the class read aloud The Girl Who Drank the Moon. Students have their choice of using notebooks...
Read-Aloud Annotations: Notebook Predictions
In this video series, Franki Sibberson's fifth graders share their strategies for annotating the class read-aloud, The Girl Who Drank the Moon. Students have their choice of using notebooks or...
Unadulterated Reading
My son sighed in exasperation and yelled across the table, “Why does my mom have to be a reading teacher?!” There it was. The dreaded phrase that I have come...
Reading Bingo
Every teacher understands the winter slump—the time of year when enthusiasm (both in students and teachers) wanes and established routines begin to feel mechanical and devoid of the life they...
Linking Evidence to Reading Response in First Grade
A group of first graders we work with is reading level M texts independently in late winter. Although the texts they’re ready and able to read have more complex ideas,...
Readers Want to Respond
My family and I were driving to a local bookstore when my son said, “I took an AR quiz today.” What?! I thought. I specifically asked his teachers not to...
The Power of Similes
Write a good simile for me. Go ahead; I’ll wait. Not so easy, right? You can come up with a bad simile in a minute or two or rattle off...
Reading The Crossover: Fourth-Grade Reading Group
Gigi McAllister leads a group of boys who are just starting the novel-in-verse The Crossover in her fourth-grade classroom.
Evidence Claims in a Middle School Small Group
Christy Ruth-Levine leads a small group of eighth graders as they explore how to include textual evidence in their literary analysis essays.
Readers’ Guides: Helping Students Think About Informational Text
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.CCRA.W.5With guidance and support from peers and adults, develop and strengthen writing as needed by planning, revising, editing, rewriting, or trying a new approach. Teachers are often waging a small...
Hunting for Textual Evidence
“Do we have to put quotes in this essay?!” “What page is that quote about repeating the past on in Gatsby?” Finding textual evidence can be hard for students. Arming...
Teaching Tone: Deal Me In
Supply List for AP Literature: Sticky Notes Binder Composition Notebook Deck of Cards I’m sure that many of my students were surprised to see a deck of cards on their...
Fear of Reading
When I first start talking about the amount of independent reading we will be doing in class during the year, I expect some of the following reactions: some groans, some...
Cause and Effect: Conferring with Olivia
Christy Rush-Levine helps eighth grader Olivia deepen her understanding of cause and effect in this reading conference.
Linking Pictures and Text: Conferring with Ava
Katrina Edwards begins her conference with first grader Ava by having her share what she learned from a picture walk through a simple text, and then she helps her use...
Four-Step Reading Conferences
Conferences with my middle school readers often went like this: I would pull up a chair alongside a reader, ask about the reader’s current book, and listen to the summary...
