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Great place for book recommendations!

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Jillian Heise {Hi-Z} is a National Board Certified Teacher with one Masters degree in Reading/Language Arts + another Masters in Library & Information Science. She has been an elementary Library Media Specialist in southeastern Wisconsin since 2017. Prior to that, she taught 7th & 8th grade ELA in the Milwaukee area for eleven years with an additional year out of the classroom as a literacy consultant. As founder of #ClassroomBookADay (inspired by Donalyn Miller's #bookaday) in 2014, Jillian is a passionate advocate for the power of shared stories to build classroom and school community and engagement. She dedicates her practice to ... read more

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A School Librarian Sharing Books & #ClassroomBookADay

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Great account for diverse book recommendations along with book reviews!

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I browse the National Book Awards list winners from the National Book Foundation for book recommendations for my classroom!

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Established in 1950, the National Book Awards are American literary prizes administered by the National Book Foundation, a nonprofit organization. A pantheon of writers such as William Faulkner, Marianne Moore, Ralph Ellison, John Cheever, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, Robert Lowell, Walker Percy, John Updike, Katherine Anne Porter, Norman Mailer, Lillian Hellman, Elizabeth Bishop, Saul Bellow, Toni Morrison, Flannery O’Connor, Adrienne Rich, Thomas Pynchon, Alice Walker, E. Annie Proulx, Jesmyn Ward, and Ta-Nehisi Coates have all won National Book Awards. Although other categories have been recognized in the past, the Awards currently honor the best Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Translated Literature, and Young People’s Literature, published each year.

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This site is a great resource for choosing new books for my classroom and staying informed on new releases! I especially love their Hot off the Press section of books they feature each month!

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The Children's Book Council (CBC) is the nonprofit trade association of children's book publishers in North America, dedicated to supporting the industry and promoting children's books and reading.

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This is an incredible organization advocating for more diverse representation in publishing and literature. I use it in choosing more diverse and inclusive books to add to my classroom library.

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A 501(c)(3) nonprofit, WNDB aims to create a world where every reader can find themselves in the pages of a book. To reach this goal, we've created programs to mentor diverse writers and illustrators, support diverse publishing professionals, and provide books to classrooms nationwide.

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I use CommonLit when I am using reading passages with my students. I love how easily I can select  passages by Lexile level, grade level, genre, literary devices, and/or theme. The site also offers Book Pairings which are passages meant to supplement novels read in class. Not only are the passages printable but students can access them online with added annotation tools, guiding questions, etc. I truly can't believe this site is free!

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For full functionality of this site it is necessary to enable JavaScript. Click here for instructions on how to enable JavaScript in your web browser.

World-class content

Access thousands of reading lessons and our comprehensive ELA curriculum, CommonLit 360.

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Tailor instruction to students' needs with text-to-speech, translation, and digital note-taking.

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Track students' reading performance, set goals, and plan instructional next steps.

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Discover thousands of free, supplemental lessons and quizzes in English and Spanish - all featuring great authors.

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Measure growth in reading comprehension with three benchmark assessments when you unlock our premium packages.

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CommonLit has made a tremendously positive impact on my teaching practice. I'm very proud to teach CommonLit!

Jennifer Lane ELA Teacher

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CommonLit definitely keeps me organized. It's easy for me to grade and it's easy for me to see students' reading growth increase throughout the year.

"

The CommonLit assessment questions are aligned to our ELA standards, which is extremely helpful when prepping for the state exam.

Teachers trust CommonLit to foster students' reading comprehension

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CommonLit | Free Online Reading Passages and Literacy Resources

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CommonLit is a comprehensive literacy program with thousands of reading lessons, full-year ELA curriculum, benchmark assessments, and standards-based data for teachers.

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It is more important now than ever that we teach our students how to distinguish legitimate sources from the abundance misinformation that exists on the internet today. This organization promotes awareness on the matter provides awesome resources for teachers!

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Tweets by NewsLitProject

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I love following Edutopia on Twitter and reading their research-based articles on all things education!

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Tweets by edutopia

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AdLit.org was a site recommended to me last semester by Dr. Wilkins. Since then, I have used it to help build my 7th graders' reading comprehension in a variety of ways. I particularly love the graphic organizers they provide for before, during and after reading. This site has introduced me to the SQ3R reading model that I plan to share with my students when we begin reading informational texts this year!

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Adolescent literacy, adolescent literacy research, reading and writing strategies, MG and YA text, adolescent literacy videos

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I refer to Reading Rockets quite a bit when I need information or guidance surrounding foundational reading skills. I have found it particularly useful in planning instruction for my struggling readers. I also appreciate the research articles it cites its information from.

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Explore reading basics as well as the key role of background knowledge and motivation in becoming a lifelong reader and learner. Watch our PBS Launching Young Readers series and try our self-paced Reading 101 course to deepen your understanding.

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A go-to site for helping me scaffold my instruction to meet the needs of my ELLs.

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A bilingual site for educators and families of English language learners

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Great information to help make book choices for the classroom!

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The Horn Book Magazine and The Horn Book Guide are the most distinguished journals in the field of children’s and young adult literature and the core of our company. Founded in 1924 by Bertha Mahony to herald the best in children’s literature, more than eighty-five years later, we are still following her lead.

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I just started Book Clubs (aka Literature Circles) with my 7th graders for the very first time and this article helped me SIGNIFICANTLY in deciding how I was going to make Book Clubs work for myself and my students.

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Last week, we kicked off our second and final round of book clubs for the year. As I shared the titles for this round of book clubs, I was asked a lot of implementation questions. What do they look like? What do kids do? How do you make them successful? And while I have been referring people back to this post that discusses the changes that we have implemented through the years, I thought it might be nice for a comprehensive post that shares the how and why of what we do.

Timeline and Time Spent

Where do book clubs fit in for us? This graph may help with our layoot for the year. While I love doing book clubs, I will not do more than two of them in a year, our students ask us for moderation in everything we do and so two is enough in order for them to have other experiences with books as well. Of course, students may choose to run their own book clubs at any point, but they are not required to discuss their books like this except for these two times.

Having a gap in the book clubs allows us to continue our all-year focus on joyful independent reading, as well as see their growth. Since we start out the year by focusing on their independent reading and then slip into a read aloud for the Global Read Aloud we have done a lot of work with establishing our overall reading community. This helps a lot when I need students to work independently either reading or discussion while I am coaching other students in our team area.

In our 90 minutes our breakdown looks something like this (note this is the only time during the year that we do not start our class with independent reading:

Five minute word study (a root word exploration required by our district).

10-20 minute mini-lesson, it becomes about 10 minutes once we have read aloud our anchor mentor text - a short story that I found in the brilliant book Unbroken - 13 Stories Starring Disabled Teens edited by Marieke Nijkamp.

Then 20 to 30 minutes is reading time for the groups. They can also choose to discuss in their group, I require they discuss in front of a teacher once a week.

After our bell break, we usually finish with book clubs and switch to our writing work for 45 minutes. We will be kicking off our This I Believe writing unit next week that fits in nicely with our book club theme.

Overall Purpose

The number one purpose of book clubs for us is for students to engage in meaningful discussions, that are rooted in their chosen books but not confined by them. We really want students to feel like they are honing their voices, continuing to carve out their ideas and thoughts on the world, and also find others to share their thoughts with. This community piece is huge for us, which is why there is very limited written work associated with their time in book clubs.

We have a few guidelines in room 235D:

The book club experience needs to protect their reading identity.

The book club experience needs to be worth their time.

The book club experience needs to give them opportunities for authentic, non-teacher directed conversations.

The book club experience needs to help them grow as readers, thinkers, and human beings.

The book club experience needs to be accessible to all types of readers. It is not just meant for the chosen few.

We want to make sure at all times that these guidelines are honored in order to protect the reading community we have painstakingly built together. This means that we check in with these guidelines before we implement anything.

This also means that the skills they are assessed on are directly tied into their discussions and not to any written work, unless they choose this. The rubric for their discussions can be viewed here. If a student does not do well in discussion or would rather be assessed through writing, we give them the option to do this one-pager created by my fantastic colleague Liz. We also have a few kids where they are doing the one-pager and discussing with an adult instead of with a group because of extenuating circumstances. However, we try our very best to give ALL kids the same experience, even if we provide more support for some of them in order to be successful. Often, kids who are labeled as below grade level readers will not be exposed to the same reading experiences and opportunities as their peers, because we worry that they will not be able to do it, however, when we remove even the opportunity for them to try then we may end up limiting their future growth. How can you ever be successful in discussions if you have never been expected to do one?

Book Choices

Central to the experience is, of course, the choice of books. While our first book club of the year is centered around Dystopian Science Fiction (which the students loved), this second round is centered on the theme overcoming obstacles. Because this is a broad theme it has allowed us to bring in all types of formats of books, as well as honor many different reading accessibility points. We, therefore, have more than 40 books to choose from. These include many genres such as realistic fiction, fantasy, science fiction, historical fiction. It also includes different formats beyond the regular chapter books such as free verse novels, graphic novels, and audio books.

While all students are expected to read at least one book in the three or so week span that clubs last, we also have groups who choose to read an entire series. They then engage in across series comparison work. One trick then is to make sure that they slow down enough to think deeply across the books and not just skim through the pages.

To see our book club choices, please view the slide show. Note: this is updated and I keep updating it so if you want to remember these choices, I would encourage you to make a copy for yourself.

One thing, we are asked a lot is how do you have so many books? There are a few factors at play here. One, my district, Oregon School District, believes in the power of funding books. This is why we have a beautiful school library and classroom libraries. We have a well-curated book room that continues to grow and expand as we add more titles, we tend to add groups of 5 to 10 titles in order to have a lot of different books to offer rather than just a few. I also buy a lot of books, I wish it wasn't that way, but I do. While I certainly buy many via traditional means, I also use Books4School and Scholastic to help supplement our collection.

Because our book clubs are central components every year, we have been adding to our collection year after year and I don't think that will stop any time soon. We have a lot of different readers and need a lot of different books.

Making Groups and Choosing Books

Because choice and honoring who our students are as human beings is a central component, we knew we needed to offer students ways to be invested in who they are spending all of this time with, as well as the book(s) that they end up reading. This is why they have a central voice in who they are with.

This starts with the partner interviews. This is a way for all students to reflect on who they are as a reader and what they need others to be in their groups. While many students naturally gravitate toward interviewing their friends, they often find that their friends' reading habits do not match their own. They use this sheet to interview each other and then hand it in. For this later round of book clubs, students were given the opportunity to totally group themselves. We did discuss that they needed to be welcoming to all students and to base this off their reading habits, not just who they were friends with. All classes did a really nice job setting up their groups. All groups are kept to 3 or 4 students, with a rare exception for a partnership or a group of 5. We like the 3 to 4 people groups because it means everyone has an active role.

We do not assign roles to members of the group because we see this as an artificial component of groups, that while it may be helpful when students first start out in book clubs in younger grades, really can end up changing the experience and not allowing them to fully express themselves they way we would like them to.

Once they have created a group, they then go through the slideshow to select their top 5 of the books. There are two rules, they have to follow:

1. No one in the group can have read the book or watched the movie.

2. Everyone has to agree to rank it.

For some of my voracious readers, there were not enough choices. We then enlist the help of our classroom library, school library, and our librarian in order to help them find something they want. This is also where I typically end up buying one or two other sets of books that then get added into our rotation.

Once their books have been selected, they turn their sheets into me and then wait a day while we puzzle out what they get. The very next day, they are then introduced to their book club choice. Students then create their own reading plan breakdown. This is once again to honor their busy lives and reading habits. They then sign up for one day a week to discuss in front of a teacher, who assesses their discussion skills. There are still a few choices here:

1. The group can choose to change their book before they even begin - we then show them what is left for them to choose from.

2. The group can choose to abandon the book together within the first 3 days of reading. This is in case they don't love it as much as they should. We want this experience to be awesome, not awful so book choice is vital.

3. A student can choose to abandon their group within the first 3 days as well, if they really dislike the book or the dynamics are not working out for some reason. They then need to approach another group to ask if they can join them (with adult support) and then catch up to that group.

If a group needs access to the audio version of the book in order for all kids to be successful, we then add the book to our Audible account. We don't ever want the decoding of the words to stand in the way for a child to truly participate since the decoding is not what is being assessed. This also allows our kiddos who need extra support to be a part of these clubs without barriers that may harm their reading identity. Many groups also end up using Audible as a way to read together, thus enhancing the reading experience.

And now they read and we start our mini-lessons. We always give them a few days to get into their book, during this time we do reminders of what we are looking for in powerful discussions, as well as have them do a main character baseline.

Other "tools" we introduce to help our students find success are...

Creating an anchor chart following our mini-lessons of what they can pay attention to when they are reading.

Handing them a bookmark that also gives them things to discuss. They tape their reading plan to the back of it. I also pull small groups that need extra support with their discussions in order to help them find success.

I stop discussions if they are not going well. If it is clear that a group is not prepared to discuss, I would rather pause them than keep them going. This means they get a chance to come back the following day once they have prepared. If it happens again, then they do their discussion ad we discuss what needs to happen the following week.

Lots of post-its or note cards. This is the only time during the year where we require students take notes as they read. I do mini-lessons on what you can annotate for so that there is a deeper meaning to their notes and not just "...the teacher said I had to do it..." some students need more help than others. They cannot discuss if they do not have evidence pulled to support their thoughts.

Discussion prep sheets. We have found that if we have students pick things they want to pay attention to and discuss the following week, their discussions are so much better. This graphic organizer changes as we see fit. Before they then discuss in front of us, we ask them what they are focused on this week and then hold them accountable for that.

Partner feedback groups. I have written more about these in this blog post.

After the first week, I pull them to discuss in front of me and then continue to do so every week. The first discussion is a formative discussion and then the following two are summative. I will write another post about what I am listening for if there is any interest in that.

PS: In case, you missed the announcement, I am running a book study of my first book Passionate Learners this summer in the Passionate Readers Facebook group. You should join us!
If you like what you read here, consider reading my newest book, Passionate Readers - The Art of Reaching and Engaging Every Child. This book focuses on the five keys we can implement into any reading community to strengthen student reading experiences, even within the 45 minute English block. If you are looking for solutions and ideas for how to re-engage all of your students consider reading my very first book Passionate Learners - How to Engage and Empower Your Students. Also, if you are wondering where I will be in the coming year or would like to have me speak, please see this page.

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How We Set Up Book Clubs in Middle School

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Last week, we kicked off our second and final round of book clubs for the year. As I shared the titles for this round of book clubs, I was asked a lot of implementation questions. What do they look like? What do kids do? How do you make them successful?

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I use this book list issued by the International Literacy Association to help me choose new books to purchase for Book Clubs or just to add to my classroom library. The Bridge Home by Padma Venkatraman, part of the 2020 Reading List, is actually one of the books some of my students are reading right now for Book Clubs!

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Another helpful article on getting started with Book Clubs!

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AMLE - Association for Middle Level Education

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What did we just read?

I am so bored!

Why are we reading this?

What's the point?

Sound familiar? These were some of the responses to reading that I received during my first year teaching bright and talented sixth graders.

How could 24 students, who for the most part liked reading, have those attitudes? It had to be the way I taught. How could I engage all 24 students?

I needed a reading instruction strategy that engaged the students and held them accountable. Literature circles seemed to fit the bill. Literature circles keep students accountable within their group, incorporate discussions about what they read at each meeting, and provide a choice that will keep them interested and invested.

When I decided to implement literature circles I kept five things in mind: (1) students get a choice in what they read, (2) teacher models literature circles to the class, (3) students remain accountable due to roles assigned within the group, (4) students have discussions about what they read and complete journal entries, and (5) students have a final project by which the teacher can assess comprehension and understanding.

1. Giving students a choice.

I asked my students what types of books they were interested in reading. I had an idea, but wanted to show them that they had a voice in their learning and had a choice of what to read.

After discussing the types of books the students were interested in, which included dystopia/utopia novels, I began to research new and forthcoming novels that my students had not read and that seemed interesting to their age group.

I presented a list of books to our librarian.Not only was she enthusiastic about finding the books on my list, she gave me other options from schools around the district. We came up with the following books based in part on being able to have enough copies for the students in my class:

Barcode Tattoo by Suzanne Weyn

The Uglies by Scott Westerfeld

People of Sparks by Jeanne DuPrau

Among the Hidden by Margaret Peterson Haddix

Life as we Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer

Enclave by Ann Aguirre

I presented the titles and authors as a book talk and asked the students to rank the books in order from those they most wanted to read to least favorite or already read. Based on the results of the survey, students were assigned to their literature circle group.

2. Modeling the literature circle.

To help students understand the basics of book discussions I modeled the roles within a literature circle by reading a picture book to the class and then leading a discussion about the book using a fishbowl strategy.

In a fishbowl strategy, a small group of students are in the middle of a circle discussing the book while the majority of the class members are listening from outside the circle.

I followed the demonstration with a video of a literature circle. As a class, we talked about the positive and negative aspects of the literature circle discussion presented on the video and how they could improve it.

Now that the students understood how the discussion should work in a literature circle, I modeled the roles of connector, discussion director, summarizer, literary luminary, and illustrator which the students would rotate through during each meeting.

3. Holding students accountable.

Students each received a schedule indicating which roles they were to play each day. Having assigned roles made the students not only accountable to read the assignment, but also helped them prepare for discussions within their group.

Students had 15 days to read their book front to back and were responsible for calculating how many pages they had to read each day to complete the novel in the time allowed. Role sheets helped prompt discussions at the beginning, but toward the end of their literature circle, students were having open discussions about what they had read and did not need their role sheet for guidance.

4. Discussing and journaling.

Before each literature circle meeting, students spent 10-15 minutes in their small groups discussing what they had read and asking questions before jumping into their book. Every student had a voice and was accountable to discuss within the group.

Students made journal entries five times during those 15 days, writing about the characters, setting, plot, problems, and resolutions. Across the five journal entries, all students increased their higher-order thinking skills. They credited the discussions with helping them understand what they had read and their ability to write about it.

5. Assessing reading comprehension.

At the end of the 15 days, students completed two final projects based on their novel.

One project was a tic-tac-toe board where students completed three small projects relating to character, setting, and plot. Students had a choice of activities such as write a newspaper, create a wanted poster, write a skit, write a song, or develop a sketchbook with captions.

Given choices, students were invested in the project and had a voice in their learning. They had the motivation to complete their projects and were enthusiastic about presenting them to the class.

For the second project, students created their own society and tried to persuade their classmates to be part of it. Since these students were reading utopia/dystopia novels, the society project fit nicely. They could implement what they knew about societies and incorporate the information they gained from their novel, including social studies, technology, math, reading, and science. Students had the option of working independently or in pairs.

To "recruit" their classmates, students prepared a Google slideshow to present to their peers. Students' slides addressed all elements of a society, including money, government, family, education, recreation, and transportation. Students developed the presentations using Google Classroom, which made it possible for me to see their progress as they added slides.

Above and Beyond

Literature circles not only improved my students' reading comprehension, they also increased their love for reading and their motivation to read.

During the 15 days we spent with literature circles, every group finished the assigned book and three finished their assigned book plus the next one in the series. One group not only finished their assigned novel, The Uglies, but they finished the whole series! I didn't suggest that they read the whole series; I simply told the class to have their novel read front to back in 15 days. They enthusiastically read not one, not two, but four novels in 15 days!

With literature circles, the students take control and the learning is driven by the students, for the students. The teacher takes on the role of facilitator-and isn't that what we really want?

Samantha Schnoor is a fifth grade teacher at Century Elementary School in Grand Forks, North Dakota.
samantha.schnoor@gfschools.org Published inAMLE Magazine, August 2016.

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What did we just read? I am so bored! Why are we reading this? What's the point? Sound familiar? These were some of the responses to reading that I received during my first year teaching bright and talented sixth graders. How could 24 students, who for the most part liked reading, have those attitudes?