June 17, 2022 · curriculum
My former co-teacher’s “shelfie” from the fall of 2020. She created it digitally, but you can also use paper! We wrote about some of the ways we set students up for summer reading a few years ago, and I still am not a fan of forced or assigned reading. There is research that reading logs actually reduce students’ motivation to read and negatively affect their attitudes toward reading . And honestly, they are just annoying! Imagine having to log how long you read and how many pages you read when you are reading before bed to relax. This applies to summer reading as well. Assigning a book or list of books students must read takes the joy out of reading. It’s much better to give them freedom and encouragement to find something they want to read and (hopefully) enjoy it! This has been a long, hard year for teachers, so it’s also really important that you find your own summer reading that is
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March 2, 2022 · book review
The picture book bracket for this year. So many good books! Happy March! I usually find there is so much to look forward to this month: spring, Women’s History Month, spring break (at my school at least), more sun, and MARCH BOOK MADNESS! March Book Madness is exactly what it sounds like. It is March Madness, but for books! There are 3 categories: picture books, middle grade books, and young adult books. Each gets its own bracket and anyone can vote on the website for each round. They start with 16 books (“Sweet 16”) and have “games” between two books and slowly go through rounds until we reach the championship. When I taught 5th grade, we followed the middle grade bracket, and in 3rd we follow the picture book bracket. It is so much fun and gets students excited about reading in so many ways. Often, students who are resistant to trying out a new genre are happy to expand their reading
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November 2, 2021 · book review
Image credit: Goodreads.com I just finished From the Desk of Zoe Washington by Janae Marks and this book has so much potential for classroom use! It is a delightful read and a wonderful middle grade novel to share with kids in many ways. The main character is having both friend and family drama which will be so relatable to many upper elementary students and middle schoolers. Also, she loves to bake and wants to be a pastry chef so the descriptions of cupcakes alone will pull some students in. I’ve always loved books that included letters between characters, and Zoe (the main character) exchanges letters with her biological father, Marcus, who is in prison. Many students (and adults) don’t hear any humanizing stories about people who are incarcerated or the toll our massive incarceration rates has on families and children. Zoe’s father, Marcus, says he is innocent, and Zoe talks to her
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September 5, 2018 · Uncategorized
Hi everyone-- Gabby here writing to you from Oregon! While one of us gearing up for another great year leading the classroom, the other one of us is actually getting ready to be a student again... (cue the student-esque excitement annnd cue the whining about homework... well, hopefully I’ve outgrown that!). When I wasn’t packing or convincing cats that it’s fun to fly on planes to their new home, I have been doing my best read some soon to be released middle grade and YA lit. I have been loving the ARC (advanced reader copy) life. Here are a few of the recently released or soon to be released (!!) notable reads from the summer. Hopefully, you haven’t spent your whole classroom budget (like we did last year!) and you’ve got room to add a few of these to your shiny classroom library to kick off the year right! Picture books- This cover is so fabulous we won't even try to make it smaller!
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June 6, 2018 · curriculum
Student book review for Out of My Mind by Sharon Draper after our book clubs wrapped up. It’s so close to the end of the year (and summer!) that we have started getting questions about summer work and summer reading. We absolutely want to encourage students to read over the summer in order to maintain their good reading habits (which are important life skills) and avoid the dreaded summer slide . In our class (and at our school), we’ve found our students tend to have consistent access to books and reading options all summer, so for the population we work with, the most important way to encourage summer reading is to promote reading all year long! All year, we have read alouds in our 3rd grade class . While we know this takes up a lot of instructional time, we have found that reading chapter books out loud to our 3rd graders has improved their comprehension, fluency, vocabulary, and
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May 22, 2018 · book review
Oh how we love representation, it is so essential and of course, it benefits all of us. As we typically note, designated 'months' for any given demographic of humans is not something we follow-- every day is a day to learn about communities and cultures you do or don't belong to! However, we do appreciate the added push for elevating underrepresented voices and perspectives! Representation was our focus this month, ensuring that as many API perspectives were integrated into our daily learning as possible. Here are a few resources that our students especially loved during "API Heritage Month"! Representation through awesome characters: Aru Shah and the End of Time and The Serpent's Secret (both pictured above) are both great adventure novels were tons of fun, and both were packed with mythology and had bright heroines! We felt like we learned a lot and the world building in both was
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November 6, 2017 · book review
A photo from our end of our read aloud celebration. Our first chapter book read aloud this year was Save Me a Seat by Gita Varadarajan and Sarah Weeks. It’s an amazing book for so many reasons, and was the perfect first read aloud for our class. While we felt it allowed for natural segues into many of the beginning of the school year discussions and activities, it’s a perfect book for anytime of the year. There are two narrators which leads to two vastly different perspectives (often on the same event). Our students reflected often on how two people can experience the same events very differently. This helped them brainstorm ways to be understanding and empathic. One of our students referenced part of the book as an explanation of how misunderstandings happen and why assumptions are dangerous. One of the main characters, Ravi, is a new student (and recent immigrant). His experiences
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July 20, 2017 · book review
Walk Two Moons by Sharon Creech is our read aloud for the last few months of the school year. Aside from being an incredibly captivating story with beautiful writing, it also fits perfectly with our curriculum as we are studying storytelling (and Sal, the main character, is telling a story) and American Indian studies (Sal has Indigenous ancestors and visits sacred Native sites). We also study Health & Wellness so the budding young romance is perfect for our class to experience as well. There are also many other relevant and significant issues skillfully woven into this story (mental illness and the related stigma, family dynamics, and gender equality, to name a few). We have a bin full of books by Sharon Creech that we only bring out of the closet (with a lot of fanfare) when we start reading Walk Two Moons . Soon, the books are fought over (especially Absolutely Normal Chaos as it
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December 15, 2016 · book review
Crazy Hair b y Neil Gaiman, Dave McKean This is one of our favorite books! Ms. Arca reads this one, but we both relate. Summary : This book is a rhyming text (we call it a poem) in which a little girl asks the main character why his hair is so "crazy". He responds with the most dazzling array of answers. There are beasts that live in his hair, and a circus, and hot air balloons.. The art is also phenomenal. Each stanza ends with "..inside my crazy hair" and even our 5th graders will fill in that section and join in the reading. How we use it: We use this text in our poetry unit . We LOVE it. This is one of the last poems that we have our students write in the unit because it is more personal. The prompt for this poem is to take back ownership and claim an aspect of yourself that you sometimes feel insecure, judged, or uncomfortable about. I (Ms. Arca) then talk about how even though
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