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Challenge 1: "Make a pledge to nurture self-selected reading every day"

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Challenge 1: "Make a pledge to nurture self-selected reading every day"

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Challenge #1: Make a pledge to nurture self-selected independent reading every day.

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Today we share the first of our challenges to help you cultivate a community of readers before the school year even starts. We’re so glad you’ve decided to come along. Challenge #1: Ma…

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Challenge 2: "Make Sure Your Classroom Library is in Tiptop Shape; Well-Stocked; Well Organized, Accessible, and Appealing"

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Challenge 2: "Make Sure Your Classroom Library is in Tiptop Shape; Well-Stocked; Well Organized, Accessible, and Appealing"

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Challenge #2: Make sure your classroom library is in tiptop shape, well-stocked, well-organized, accessible, and appealing. Then make a plan for how you will introduce the library to your students in the early days of school, gradually inviting them to explore particular baskets, shelves, or sections.
"A library is not a luxury but one of the necessities of life." -Henry Ward Beecher How Does This Help Grow A Community of Readers?
Want to cultivate a true community of readers? It all starts with books. And that means giving the book collection center stage in your classroom.

Classroom libraries aren't just a fad or fun idea. A great deal of research provides proof that they make a difference in the lives of young readers. Students in classrooms with well-designed libraries interact more with books, spend more time reading, demonstrate more positive attitudes toward reading, and exhibit higher levels of reading achievement (NAEP, 2005). Also, access to an abundance of books within the classroom results in increased motivation and increased reading achievement (Kelley, M. & Clausen-Grace, N., 2010; Worthy & Roser, 2010; Guthrie, 2008; Routman, 2003).

The basics for classroom library organization are simple. Collect lots of great books. Organize them in meaningful categories, find an appealing and accessible space to display them, and help your students think about and try different ways to find what they are looking for.

Whether your classroom library is a humble little bookcase with two or three shelves to start, or has been built from enormous resources over the course of many years, all classroom libraries need continual care and nurturing. So, before your classroom library is back in business this fall, take some time to give those beloved books some love and attention.

Below, we've included a wide array of ideas and links for organizing and maintaining a classroom library.
Ideas to Get Started

Make sure your classroom library is located in a place where it is easily accessible. Changing the location of the library once the school year has started can be truly challenging, but in the summer time, your classroom is a bit of a clean slate. So if you haven't been in love with the location of your library in the past, now is the time to make the move.

Organizing books in baskets (by genre, topic, author, series, etc.) with labels that describe the contents not only make finding books easier for students, but also save on wear and tear since books aren't being shoved back into shelves. If you don't have baskets and are on a tight budget, has a $1.00 basket that can be a great starting point. They won't hold up forever, but they will definitely get you started. Dollar Tree

Even if you're not moving the library, you might need to allow yourself to tear things apart and make a bit of a mess before putting them back in order. What seemed like a logical system of organization and labeling at one time can quickly change as your collection evolves.

Consider allowing your students to make labels for baskets as you introduce them. We know some teachers who encourage students to adopt a basket of books for the year. This means they label, advertise, organize, and periodically check the basket for books that have been placed there by accident.

We also recommend leaving a couple baskets empty with signs on them that read something like, "What kind of book basket would you like to see in the library?" or "What's missing from our library?" By doing this, you will engage your students in the creation of library baskets, which will help foster ownership and care of the library. The library will not be only yours to take care of and maintain, but it will be an ongoing community project.

Maintain a wish list of titles you'd like to add to your classroom library (Amazon makes creating a wish list simple!). Post it on your classroom website, in your weekly newsletter, or simply share your Amazon link with those who may be interested in donating to your classroom.

Questions to Consider

What about location? Is my classroom library easily accessible? How many students can comfortably browse at a time? Are the books easily in reach?

Is the library appealing? Is it well lit? What fun touches might add a little charm? A rug? A lamp? A few floor pillows? Rather than going out and buying these items, we suggest asking friends, family, or community businesses for items to donate. You'd be amazed with what people would love to just give away!

How are the books organized? Are there some categories that have grown to the point of being able to be split?

What supports will you provide to help your readers find what they're looking for and return books to the right location? Labeled baskets? Labeled shelves? Stickers, symbols or other markings on books that correlate with their basket or shelf?

How might you engage students in helping to care for the library?

What categories have seemed most popular in the past? What can be learned from that?

What is the ratio of nonfiction to fiction?

Within nonfiction and fiction, are different genres represented: for example, historical fiction, realistic fiction, prose, etc.?

What favorite authors might be highlighted?

What series are featured?

What is missing? Although you may not know who will be in your class, do you have an idea of who is missing from your library? Do you think your students will see themselves in the books you have on the shelves? If not, these missing books should be a priority. All students have the right to see themselves in the literature we promote in school.

Helpful Links NCTE Position Statement on Classroom Libraries
Simple Starts Appendix A - A free download from Kari's book Simple Starts: Making the Move to a Reader-Centered Classroom from Heinemann.

Creating a Classroom Library from Reading Rockets

Gradual Release of the Library Choice Literacy article from Bitsy Parks

15 Free or Cheap Ways to Stock Your Classroom Library from We Are Teachers

Five Major Functions of a Class Library from Scholastic

Ten Tips from Laura Robb: Classroom Libraries and Access to Books

How to Organize a Classroom Library, 20 Points to Consider from Carrie Gelson

Summer Maintenance in the Classroom Library Series from Carrie Gelson:

We'd love to hear from you. What are you going to try differently this year in your classroom library? How will you start to make this challenge come to life? We'd love to hear your ideas over on our Facebook group . Come and join us!
Don't miss a single post in this series! Click on the Follow button (on the side bar or below) to have every new challenge delivered right to your inbox.

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Challenge #2: Make sure your classroom library is in tiptop shape: well-stocked, well-organized, accessible, and appealing.

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Challenge #2: Make sure your classroom library is in tiptop shape, well-stocked, well-organized, accessible, and appealing. Then make a plan for how you will introduce the library to your students in the early days of school, gradually inviting them to explore particular baskets, shelves, or sections.

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Challenge 3: "Prepare Displays, Table Baskets, Book Shelves, or Stacks of Enticing Books

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Challenge 3: "Prepare Displays, Table Baskets, Book Shelves, or Stacks of Enticing Books

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Challenge #3: Prepare displays, table baskets, book shelves, or stacks of enticing books for every age and stage that you work with. The purpose of this challenge is to ensure that every child comes face to face with a tantalizing collection of books from the minute they enter your classroom. One of our favorite ways to do this is to have table baskets of an inviting variety of books sitting out from the first moment of the first day.
"Although I enjoy digging through the library to help students find books, my aim is to help them develop self-confidence in choosing books for themselves." -Donalyn Miller, The Book Whisperer How Does This Help Grow A Community of Readers?
For many of our students, absolute free reign of the classroom library may be a bit overwhelming at first. Think about the last time you were at a restaurant with a massive menu- The Cheesecake Factory comes to mind. Their menu is over a dozen pages long! Choosing what to drink let alone an entire meal can be quite the task when presented with so many choices.

Likewise, choosing what to read in a sea of books can sometimes feel overwhelming to our students, especially for those who may be new to choice reading. We agree with Donalyn Miller that it is our goal to help students develop self confidence in independently choosing books. To do this, we like to start small. Rather than offering an entire library of choices during the first few days of school, we recommend offering a few baskets, stacks, or shelves of books that you know have been loved in the past. By doing this in the beginning and then slowly adding to their choices, we're helping our readers get to know their preferences in manageable ways.

When we draw attention to what we consider to be some "best of the best" authors, genres, categories, or themes for the ages and stages of readers in our classroom, we can help readers find a starting point ("Hmm... I know I love pasta, maybe I'll check out that section of the menu."). When readers finally do have access to the entire library, they'll have already started to identify some preferences by paying attention to the kinds of books that draw them in and hold their attention.
Tips to Get Started

Table baskets can work well at any age. We love them because they allow kids to get their hands of books from the first moment of the first day. A table basket is a carefully selected collection of 10 - 20 books that we know will draw a wide variety of readers in. They typically include loved picture books, firsts in a series, graphic novels, highly visual informational texts, old favorites from previous years, reference and record books, etc. With a basket of books like this at the center of a table and a few minutes of time to dig in, students can explore a variety of text types themselves as well as start to interact with each other about what it is they look for and love in a book. The table baskets say from the start, "We are a community of readers. Let's explore some books together and see what we find." The beauty of the baskets is, once you've created one basket per table, you can simply rotate baskets every day for the first week or so to provide even more variety for your readers.

Consider providing mini-booktalks about some of the books you've put in baskets or on display, saying things like, "If you like adventure . . . . . And when our classroom library opens soon, you'll find a whole basket of books by this author (genre, topic, etc.)"

Display enticing books throughout your classroom. You can use purchased display stands ( we found them for about a buck a piece on Amazon ) or make your own by turning a wire hanger (the hateful kind that come from the drycleaners) into a book stand as shown in this YouTube Video.

Questions to Consider

Where do you display books in your classroom?

What books will you purposefully have on display from the first moments of the school year?

How often will you trade out the books on display in your classroom?

What type of books are you most likely to be excited about sharing with your students? What type of books do you need to remind yourself to include, even though they aren't your own personal favorites?

Have you used table baskets in the past? Stacks or shelves for the first days of school? If not, what might be a starting point for you?

What are some other ways you help readers get their hands on books from day one?

Whether it's a gigantic menu or an enormous classroom library, too many options can be overwhelming at first. The reverse is also true. If there are too few choices, we can quickly become disinterested or disappointed.

Building a community of readers begins by getting kids excited about books. By selecting and highlighting some high interest genres, topics, authors, and series in the early days of school, we increase the likelihood that the earliest reading experiences students have with us are positive ones. We also start to create a sense of anticipation within students about what they might want to read next.
Helpful Links
Rather than sharing a list of links in this post, we recommend perusing the links from Challenge #2 on classroom libraries. Images of libraries and book displays abound on the internet. We don't mean to suggest the goal isn't to make the room look "Pinterest perfect". We've seen how that be both a financial drain, an energy drain and a whole new source of stress for teachers. Instead, we simply recommend starting with what you have, doing what feels manageable, and building as you go. You've got great books in your collection. Get some of them out front and center and they'll naturally steal the show of any display!

We'd love to hear from you. What type of display or table basket do you imagine building first? How will you start to make this challenge come to life? Come on over to our Facebook group to join the conversation and maybe share a few of your ideas for displays and book baskets.
Make sure you don't miss a single post in this series! Click on the FOLLOW button (on the side bar or below) to have every new challenge delivered right to your inbox.

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Challenge #3: Prepare displays, table baskets, book shelves, or stacks of enticing books.

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Challenge #3: Prepare displays, table baskets, book shelves, or stacks of enticing books for every age and stage that you work with. The purpose of this challenge is to ensure that every child comes face to face with a tantalizing collection of books from the minute they enter your classroom.

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Challenge 4: "Make a Plan for Student Storage and Management of Self-Selected Reading Materials"

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Challenge 4: "Make a Plan for Student Storage and Management of Self-Selected Reading Materials"

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Challenge #4: Make a plan for student storage and management of their self-selected books. Take some time to think through what you want students to have in their bags or boxes. How many texts? What kind of variety? What other tools? Set up a sample bag (box, baggie, stack) of your own to use for demonstration and modeling with your students.

"For every minute spent organizing, an hour is earned." -Benjamin Franklin
How Does This Help Grow A Community of Readers?
When it's time for independent reading, the last thing you want to hear is, "I can't find my books." Or "I don't have anything to read." To prevent this from ever happening, we're advocates of helping students build and constantly curate a personal collection of books. This, of course, looks a little different depending on the age or stage of reading development of each student. But, the goal is to avoid the many pitfalls of having students choose just one book at a time and then try to find the next. Instead, we try to help students develop the skills and strategies for always having a generous supply of potential next reads waiting in the wings, whether it is a physical collection, or a written list of next reads.
Considerations for Primary Readers
We find that with students in grades K-2 a general rule of thumb is for them to have about 10 to 15 books in their baskets or baggies at any given time. For readers in this age range, a box that allows the books to stand upright for easy organization and browsing works well.

One of the benefits of having all of their reading materials in a box is that it also helps aid primary readers with their reading spot selection. When selecting a good place to read, primary readers can easily grab their book boxes and head to their spot in one trip when reading time starts rather than making multiple trips back and forth to gather all of their reading materials. This is a huge time saver that will help our youngest readers make the most of their valuable independent reading time. Then, on a weekly basis, they can do some shopping for new books, trading out the ones they're done with, keeping a few favorites or books they've not yet spent time with, and finding a few new treasures. Many primary grade teachers find it works best to assign readers a special day of the week for "book shopping" to take place.
Considerations for Older Readers
In the intermediate and middle grades, as students start to read longer texts, they typically won't select as many books at a time, but we still like to encourage students to have more than one text at their fingertips. Variety is often the key with older readers. For instance, we might encourage older readers to have a novel, an informational text or two, and some type of shorter length text like poetry, a magazine, etc. By helping students learn how to be proactive in choosing a variety of texts, we increase the likelihood that they are able to make use of longer and longer stretches of time with their self-selected texts. This is especially true in the fall of the year.

Lots of readers with lots of books and takes some planning and organization.

Designing a system to support your readers in keeping their texts and materials organized not only gives them easy access to their books each day, but it also ensures that valuable reading time is not lost to digging through their desks or backpacks for a lost book, aimlessly browsing in the classroom library, or getting lost in the hallway between the classroom and their locker.

When a storage or organizational classroom plan is in place and it's time for self-selected independent reading, students grab their bag, box, or stack of reads and off they go to their reading spots. There is no wondering "What will I read today?" or "Where did I put my book?"
Ideas to Get You Started

If you've got a small classroom, you might choose bags rather than boxes since they can easily be stored inside a desk, on the back of a chair or on hooks on the wall.

Many businesses give away free reusable bags with advertising on them. Reach out and explain what you'll be using the bags for and how they'll support learning in your classroom. Chances are the business people will be happy to help out with a donation of bags. You can thank them with photos of their bags in action with students.

Adult sized shoe boxes can make great individual storage boxes in the primary grades. Ask students and fellow staff members for help in rounding them up and we're guessing you're request will result in a lots of quantity and variety of shoe boxes. Be sure to choose the sturdiest ones as keepers. And of course we've no doubt you've got a dozen quick ideas about how these could be customized by students.

Short on time and money? Large sized Ziplock bags can work well to get get you going. Gallon bags work well for most books will, or you can try the Hefty 2.5 gallon sized bag , big enough for any book your students encounter.

If you've got a budget and plan to purchase individual plastic tubs, shop around. Really Good Stuff has an amazing variety of study tubs. Kari loves these because they are narrow enough to conserve space but have little extender feet to prevent them from tipping over from if they are free standing.

With older readers bags and boxes are not always necessary. Some teachers simply have readers keep their books on top of their tables in stacks or on a designated counter top. An added bonus to storing books this way is that it makes everyone's choices visible, doubling as an advertisement and conversation starter between readers.

About once every two weeks with older readers, it's a good idea to give the class an opportunity to reevaluate their stacks. Invite readers to put abandoned books back into the library, chat with other readers about what they're currently reading, and grow their future-reads lists.

Questions to Consider

Do you have access to boxes or bags already? If not, do you have a budget for this?

If you used bags, boxes or stacks last year, what did you like about your system? What were some of the challenges? How might you adjust this year?

Do you have space for individual baskets in your classroom? If so, where will they be stored when students are not engaged in reading?

What kind of plan or system will you have to make sure students have regular opportunities to refresh their book boxes or shop for next reads?

How many books will you encourage students to select at one time?

If management of book bags, boxes, or book stacks is new to you, who could you collaborate or connect with to get support?

Helpful Links Simple Starts: Making the Move to a Reader-Centered Classroom by Kari Yates available through Heinemann Rethinking the Book Box by Genia Cornell
We'd love to hear from you. How do you think you might approach student storage of books? How will you start to take actionable steps to make this challenge become a reality? We'd love to hear your ideas over on our Facebook group . Come and join us!
Don't miss a single post in this series! Click on the FOLLOW button (on the side bar or below) to have every new challenge delivered right to your inbox.

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Challenge #4: Make a plan for student storage & management of self-selected books.

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Challenge #4: Make a plan for student storage and management of their self-selected books. Take some time to think through what you want students to have in their bags or boxes. How many texts? What kind of variety? What other tools? Set up a sample bag (box, baggie, stack) of your own to use for...

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Challenge 5: "Start Taking Note of the Authentic Ways You Respond to Your Own Reading"

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Challenge 5: "Start Taking Note of the Authentic Ways You Respond to Your Own Reading"

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Challenge #5: Start taking note of the authentic ways you respond to your own reading. In order to support students in responding to texts in meaningful and authentic ways, we might start by reflecting on the ways we respond to texts as readers ourselves.
"Each of us is unduplicated, bringing to the text a unique personality, a unique set of expectations and hopes, a unique personal history. Consequently, what we make of the text will be unique." How Does This Help Grow A Community of Readers?
To know and nurture readers in the direction of AUTHENTIC RESPONSE is to help them do the things that readers in the world outside of school naturally do in response to reading: think, feel, question, wonder, talk, and take action as growing readers and deep-thinking, contributing citizens of the world.

The most authentic responses to reading happen because we have been affected by what we've read, not because we are assigned to prove that we have read. So, today's challenge is a simple one. Let's use what we notice about our own responses as readers to inform our interactions with readers.

Take a moment to reflect on your own reading life. As adults with thriving reading lives, we find ourselves responding to reading in dozens of different ways. We laugh. We cry. We are affirmed by recognizing our own human struggles in a story. We are inspired by
the courage of others, and therefore may become, a bit braver as we as we respond to our own circumstances.We may experience a renewed sense of optimism about the good in the world or we may experience the opposite. We become more well- informed about steps we might take to make the world a better place. We are called to action; now that we know something we must do something. We feel compelled to share with a colleague, a friend, a neighbor. We feel the urge to write to someone or about something. We go online and write a review. We organize what we've read into a notes for ourselves or for others, synthesizing a longer text into its most important ideas.

We feel a new sense of empathy and understanding for those whose lives we've not previously understood. We fall in love with an author or become engrossed with a new topic. We start a new series and feel the frantic compulsion to find the next book and the
next. Sometimes we even decide to go right back to the beginning of a book and start again.

As a adults readers we don't fill out worksheets or packets. We don't make dioramas or clay models of our characters. We don't read to simply understand the little black marks on the page. We read to be somehow changed by them.

So this year, let's empower readers with more choice about how they respond to reading. Let's work harder to honor the internal responses that readers have (thinking and feeling) at least as much as we do the external (doing). Let's recommit to the power of talk as one of the most natural and powerful means of responding to text. And let's let go of packets and worksheets that give students the idea reading is about hunting for answers to prove to the teacher you've read the book.

This year, let's not ask readers to do anything we ourselves would never do in response to a text.
Tips to Get Started

Think about ways you authentically respond to your own reading. Jot those down for yourself. We venture to guess that you do not write book reports or create three dimensional dioramas.

The next time you find yourself reading a book, newspaper, online article, or even an email, pause to take note about how you're responding.

Are you agreeing or disagreeing with the text?

Is the text causing an emotional reaction or intellectual curiosity?

Are you finding that you want to talk with someone about what you're reading?

Is the text prompting you to take action? Do you suddenly see new possibilities for how to organize your utility closet? Or does something in the news strike such a cord that you find yourself passionately drafting a message to your congressional representative?

Have you slowed down in the last few precious pages of a novel, not wanting it to end?

Start thinking about a few lessons you may offer to help your students reflect on ways to authentically respond to text. Make a plan for giving this topic some attention in the first weeks of school, b uilding a menu of response options together with your students over time. Christina created this chart with her students as she offered quick mini lessons on some response options in the beginning of the school year last September.

If possible, ask a family member or friend to read the same article or passage with you. Any short piece of text will do. Then, engage in a discussion. Take note of the different ways each of you authentically respond to a text. Then, consider how an activity like this might work for your students.

Questions to Consider

What are you noticing about your own responses to texts? Do you find you respond differently with different types of text? If so, how?

How might you support your students in identifying the authentic ways they are already responding to their texts as readers?

What are some options available in your classroom for students to engage in authentic reader response? What choices do your students have?

In what ways have you encourage students to recognize both internal (thinking and feeling) and external (doing) responses? Do you value one type over the other?

How might you stretch yourself to to let go of some "prove you've read" activities in lieu of more authentic options?

Thinking about the age group you work with, what are the first few examples of response that you might highlight with them?

Helpful Links
The Best Gift is Paying a Good Book Forward , by Kathryn Harris, LA Times

Why We Must Read Literature from Kylene Beers

Reasons to Recommend a Book from Scholastic

Why We Need to Embrace Book Abandonment from Pernille Ripp

To Know and Nurture a Reader; Conferring with Confidence and Joy has an entire chapter dedicated to practical and actionable steps to supporting more authentic reader response.

We'd love to hear from you. What are your noticing about your own responses as a reader? How do you authentically respond to text? We'd love to hear your ideas over on our Facebook group. Come and join us!
Don't miss a post in this series! Click on the FOLLOW button (on the side bar or below) to have every new challenge delivered right to your inbox.
Children's book in image: Fever 1793 by Laurie Halse Anderson

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Challenge #5: Start taking note of the authentic ways you respond to your own reading.

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Challenge #5: Start taking note of the authentic ways you respond to your own reading. In order to support students in responding to texts in meaningful and authentic ways, we might start by reflecting on the ways we respond to texts as readers ourselves. __________________________________________________________ "Each of us is unduplicated, bringing to the text a unique...

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Challenge 6: "Start Creating a Thoughtful Stack of Books You Simply Can't Wait to Read Aloud to Your Students

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Challenge 6: "Start Creating a Thoughtful Stack of Books You Simply Can't Wait to Read Aloud to Your Students

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Challenge #6: Start creating a thoughtful stack of books you can't wait to read aloud to your students. Of course once you meet next year's students you'll naturally adjust, but now is your chance to make sure you're never caught short of read aloud ideas.
"More than all the academic benefits, the most important thing about reading aloud to a child is giving them the gift of the joy of reading." -Ernest Morrell Then Read Aloud
If you want kids to want to read,

Then read aloud to them.

If you want kids to fall crazy in love with great books,

Then read great books aloud to them.

If you want kids to view books as a way to learn about themselves,

Then read aloud books that mirror the soul.

If you want kids to travel to new corners of their minds,

Then read aloud stories of adventure and exploration.

If you want kids to become civil and graceful human beings,

Then read aloud tales that teach respect and human kindness.

If you want kids never to stop growing as readers,

Then never stop reading aloud.
Kari Yates, Simple Starts 2015 How Does This Help Grow A Community of Readers?
The early days of the school year are prime time for oodles of read alouds! In fact, many teachers we know greet their students with a read aloud within the very first moments of the first day. When it comes to finding ways to make the first days memorable, ensure success for every single student, build relationships, and help ease students back into the routines of the school day, read aloud is at the top of our list.

There are countless strategies you might use for choosing read aloud texts, but we hope your first is simply to choose for the pure joy of it. Read aloud is your daily opportunity to say to students, "Reading is an amazing way to spend your time. I can't wait to share this book with you!"

As the year progresses, read aloud becomes the bedrock foundation of who you are and where you've traveled together as a reading community. It becomes your history and the collection of stories and experiences that you come back to and draw on throughout the days, the weeks, and the months ahead. Read aloud supports your content area learning. And maybe most importantly, it sets every member of the community up for full participation every time.

Read aloud is your chance to sell the love of reading every day. It has the potential to expand every students' sense of possibility when we use it to introduce new authors, topics, genres, grade level favorites, and ways of choosing, navigating, and reflecting on texts. So, what better time than to today to start a stack. Pile up a couple of dozen books or more that you hope to share with your readers.
Ideas to Get Started

Help read alouds live on in your classroom. Create a "Books We've Read Together" basket to place books in after they've been read aloud. This makes all the books you've read aloud available to students during independent reading. The read aloud acts as a preview and a scaffold making texts accessible to a much wider range of students.

Use read aloud to strategically introduce new authors, genres, or first book in a popular series that you hope some readers might get hooked on.

Collect multiple copies of favorite read alouds so that you can easily share them with multiple interested readers after the initial reading.

Read aloud a first chapter or section of a longer text that you hope will intrigue some readers to finish on their own.

Make sure your read aloud includes a wide variety of text types and lengths. If reading aloud a full length novel to your students, try interspersing some shorter length texts along the ways, such as picture books, poetry, or new articles.

Choose some read alouds that have cross curricular connections, allowing you to get more bang for your buck because time is our most precious resource.

Be sure to use read aloud (and book talks) to do what Donalyn Miller refers to "blessing the book". This means strategically including texts that every type of reader in our class might enjoy, even some that are very nontraditional or well below below grade level. By doing so, you say to the whole reading community, "This type of text is a worthy and legitimate choice in our classroom."

Keep in mind, once your students arrive, you may want to adjust some of your choices to make sure all of your readers are represented in the books you choose to read aloud. Nothing feels more welcoming and warm to a child than reading a book and thinking, "Hey, that kid is just like me!" So, pick your books ahead of time, but leave room to add more after you meet your new students.

Get in the habit of routinely asking others for recommendations. Ask your teaching colleagues, library/media specialist, and students what they recommend.

Utilize online resources to get new ideas of what's hot for your age group. We've provided some starting points in the helpful links section below.

There are so many amazing books in the world, and you only have about 180 days to read aloud, so now is the perfect time to start to create that pile or basket of books that represent the experiences and opportunities you want to offer this year's readers.
Helpful Links Back to the Books Video with Donalyn Miller: Read Alouds for All Ages Scholastics 100 Best Read Aloud Books Teacher's Picks Top 25 Picture Books 10 Most Fun Picture Books to Read Aloud Popular Picture Book Read Aloud Book Shelf from Good Reads Picture Book Read Alouds from Parent's Choice 10 Amazing Books to Read Aloud to Big Kids from Common Sense Media Books to Read Aloud in Grades 3-5
From We are Teachers
50 Great Books for Kindergarten 50 of the Best Books for 1st Grade 50 of the Best Books for 2nd Grade
The Best 50 Books to Share with Your 3rd Grader s
50 of the Best Books for 4th Grade 20 of Our Favorite Books for 5th Grade Best Middle School Books
We'd love to hear from you. What are some books you're considering reading aloud n the first days of school? Please share some of your selections with our Facebook group. Come and join us!
Don't miss a single post in this series! Click on the FOLLOW button (on the side bar or below) to have every new challenge delivered right to your inbox.
Children's books in images: Thank You, Mr Falker by Patricia Polacco, Wonder by RJ Palacio, The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein

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Challenge #6 Start creating a thoughtful stack of books you can't wait to read aloud to your students.

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Challenge #6: Start creating a thoughtful stack of books you can't wait to read aloud to your students. Of course once you meet next year's students you'll naturally adjust, but now is your chance to make sure you're never caught short of read aloud ideas. __________________________________________________________ "More than all the academic benefits, the most important...

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Challenge 7: "Make a List of Books You'll Highlight Through Book Talks in the First Month of School"

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Challenge 7: "Make a List of Books You'll Highlight Through Book Talks in the First Month of School"

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Challenge #7: Make a list of books you want to highlight through book talks in the first month of school. Get yourself ready to offer a book talk or basket talk every day for the first few weeks of school week. Of course you'll adjust once you meet your students, but you can count on having a variety of readers and so you'll want to be strategic in making sure you enthusiastically and systematically introduce a well rounded set of possibilities.
"Strangers talking over piles of books do not remain strangers long." -Matthew Pearl How Does This Help Grow A Community of Readers?
Book talks are quick informal conversations about books, meant to spread the joy and enthusiasm that one reader has about a book with other readers in an attempt to persuade them to read the book as well. In other words, book talks are moments dedicated to spreading book love around a particular text, series, author, or even classroom book basket.

Not only do book talks connect readers to books, but they also connect readers to each other. Introducing book talking by offering frequent book talks in the early days of the school year is a surefire way to get readers excited about reading books and excited to talk with each other about books.

Readers who are excited about books naturally want to tell other readers about them. So, providing modeling, time, space, and support to help readers develop their own book talking skills is time well spent in the early days of the school year. Book talks are the stuff of real life authentic response to reading. When you or I get excited about a book, we naturally start to think of the other people in our life who might also be excited to know about the book, and we often find a way to tell them, hoping to convince them that the book would be worth their time.

When you start the year with a series of quick, informal talks about books you think your students will love, you let them know right from the start that talk about books is something that you value, and that it's the job of the whole community of readers to share the word about great books. Book talking then becomes a way of life (rather than a thing we take turns doing on Fridays) with readers talking to other readers every day about the books they are reading now, have read in the past, and plan to read in the future.
Ideas to Get Started

Keep book talks short and sweet. It's not a book report, it's a teaser, meant to tell just enough to get readers interested.

Get students involved from the beginning. Student book talks don't necessarily need to be whole class events. Students can book talk with a partner, small group, or even in "speed dating" format. Mix it up. The trick is to make sure that every day there are opportunities for readers in your classroom to tell other readers about books they've read or are currently reading.

In the beginning of the year, we have found book talking every day for the first two to three weeks of school to be very powerful in igniting excitement around books. We recommend planning out the first week of talks and then seeing what students may be interested in to plan out the following weeks.

When book talking about a book from your classroom library, be sure to highlight the area of the library where it can be found. In this way some of your book talk can double as basket talk. It may sound something like this: "If you're interested in this book, or other books like this, you're going to want to check out the ____________ basket in our library."

Challenge yourself to share a book talk from each basket, genre, or category in your classroom library throughout the year, therefore stretching yourself to include books for readers with a wide range of interests.

Consider sprinkling in some video book trailers as well as teaching students how they can use book trailers to find and preview books for themselves. Students can also make book trailers themselves, posting them via QR codes inside book jackets.

Keep the future in mind... At first, you'll be giving most of the books talks in the classroom. Eventually, once you invite students to try it out, they will start to give the talks themselves. Over the past two school years, Christina's 5th graders kept a running list of who would be voluntarily give a book talk during the morning meetings each day. Doing this planning work up front will allow you to pass the baton of book talking to your readers quickly and intentionally.

A culture of book talks naturally lends itself to teaching students ways they might keep track of books they want to read in the future. From a simple list of future reads, to a Padlet board pinned with book covers, there are endless ways to help kids learn to keep a running list of books they don't want remember down the line.

Questions to Consider

Have you considered creating a regular routine of offering book talks to your students? How might you make more room for book talks in your day?

Who can you talk with about books to get started? A colleague, a family member?

What modeling or explicit teaching can you plan for how to give a book talk?

How often will you offer book talks to the whole class? To small pockets of readers with similar interest or needs? To individuals who need extra support with finding their way to a great book?

How might you encourage your students to take charge of book talking for themselves? In what ways might technology enhance book sharing options in your classroom?

Helpful Links Book Talk Examples and How-To Mr. Schu - The Important of Book Talking
How to Easily Do a Book Talk from Pernille Ripp
Book Talks, Book Trailers, and Book Teasers Quick Video of Kate Messner Describes Book Talking Creating a Book Talking Culture - A Video with Donalyn Miller To keep your collection fresh and interesting and your knowledge of books growing, we share the following blogs and websites. Build Your Stack Initiative from NCTE Jen Robinson's Book Page
We'd love to hear from you. What are some books you're considering book talking during the first days of school? Please share some of your selections with our Facebook group. Come and join us!
Don't miss a single post in this series! Click on the FOLLOW button (on the side bar or below) to have every new challenge delivered right to your inbox.

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Challenge #7: Make a list of books you want to highlight through book talks in the first month of school.

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Challenge #7: Make a list of books you want to highlight through book talks in the first month of school. Get yourself ready to offer a book talk or basket talk every day for the first few weeks of school week. Of course you'll adjust once you meet your students, but you can count on having...

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Challenge 8: "Envision the Ways You Will Encourage and Nurture Interactions Within Your Community of Readers"

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Challenge 8: "Envision the Ways You Will Encourage and Nurture Interactions Within Your Community of Readers"

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Challenge #8 Envision the ways you will encourage and nurture interactions within the community of readers. What are the different ways you can encourage, model, and cultivate authentic interactions between your students in the reading community?
"We read to know that we are not alone." -C.S. Lewis How Does This Help Grow A Community of Readers?
Books can provide us so much: a friend in a lonely moment, a shelter from a metaphorical storm, a window into other's lives, and even a mirror to remind us that we are not walking this journey on our own. Books truly are a gift. Nothing is more special than being able to share that kind of gift with a friend.

The possibilities for sharing books with a friend are really endless. Whether it be through verbal, written, digital, or even drawn recommendations- adding space for book recommendations in your school routine will add to your community of readers in a way that no other activity possibly can. The act of book recommendation encourages us to think about others and what may work work well for them- we often think about their interests, preferences, and who they truly are as people. When we help our students do this for each other, not only are they connecting a person to a book, but also they are making a special bond person to person.

In addition to book recommendations, readers can also connect through opportunities to partner read and informally chat about books. Partner reading provides students with a shared one to one experience around a book with another reader. Each partner read opportunity provides students with a chance to get to know another person in class a little better through a book.

Book Mingling is another way to do this. Book Mingling is when a few minutes is devoted to the whole class moving around the room with their current read in hands, stopping to chat with other readers about those books. This is such a fun and easy activity to do to encourage interaction around reading. For more information on Book Mingling, see the link below.

We also love informal written interactions. Have you ever considered posing a simple question on the white board for students to respond to, or even make use of a graffiti wall?
Tips to Get Started

Prior to the first day of school, consider preparing a few different types of recommendations on your own to share with your readers every few days in class. Some of the recommendations you can prepare include a verbal book talk, a written recommendaion and accompanying image to be placed on a bulletin board,

Consider digital options. Our interaction with others is becoming increasingly digital. By using digital options to connect around books, not only are we helping our students authentically respond to reading, but also we are encouraging and often introducing them to positive ways of being a digital citizen. Two of our favorite digital options for sharing books are Padlet and Flipgrid. Christina and her fifth graders really enjoy maintaining a classroom Padlet of books read throughout the year while Kari loves the power of video that flipgrid provides. We've included tutorials for both in the links below.

Also, keep in mind that recommendations do not have to be long- sometimes a post- it taped on the inside back cover of a book or even a classroom visual bookshelf of books recommended can hold a lot of weight when it comes to sharing books.

If you're a teacher who may be new to student talk during independent reading time, thinking about ways to ease yourself into a more vocal reading time may be a good idea. Consider thinking about ways to introduce talk during the reading workshop or independent reading time that will gradually grow. We know teachers who designate one part of the room as a talk section and another part as a quiet reading section. Modeling talk during independent reading time can also be helpful. One teacher we know demonstrates a quite chat with another reader and then does a similar chat in a regular speaking voice so students can experience the difference. Talk during reading time may not seem natural or be easy at first, so thinking about how you can incorporate it now before the school year starts will be extremely beneficial to you and your students.

Questions to Consider

How will you make space in your busy teaching day or week for students to interact with each other around books?

What are some ways you have tried in the past to foster interaction ebtween readers?

What are one or two new ways you might push yourself to try this coming school year?

How will you get in on the interactions with your students?

Helpful Links Padlet Tutorial for Teachers Flipgrid Tutorial for Teachers
We'd love to hear from you. How do you imagine you will first encourage interactions around books? How will you start to make this challenge come to life? We'd love to hear your ideas over in our Facebook group. Come and join us!
Don't miss a single post in this series! Click on the FOLLOW button (on the side bar or below) to have every new challenge delivered right to your inbox.

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Challenge #8 Envision the ways you will encourage and nurture interactions within the community of readers.

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Challenge #8 Envision the ways you will encourage and nurture interactions within the community of readers. What are the different ways you can encourage, model, and cultivate authentic interactions between your students in the reading community? __________________________________________________________ "We read to know that we are not alone." -C.S.

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Challenge 9: "Get Organized for Conferring"

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Challenge 9: "Get Organized for Conferring"

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Challenge #9: Get organized for conferring. Start out by treating yourself to a few new conferring materials that you'll be excited to pick up and carry around every day of the school year. A colorful new clipboard? Some funky pens in your favorite colors, ink types, or styles? Perhaps some fun sticky notes to use as "leave behinds" with students. Then, organize your conferring materials in a place where they are easy to grab and go.
"To make the most of every minute, you'll want all your tools and -Yates and Nosek How Does This Help Grow A Community of Readers? supplies at your fingertips and ready to go."
Getting organized for conferring, means getting organized to take your teaching on move. It means keeping a few simple, but critical supplies organized and ready to grab at a moment's notice, so that what you need is at your fingertips when you need it.

There are a few items that we return to again and again for conferring. For instance, we love sticky notes, and couldn't imagine setting out to confer without them. We leave simple jots and visuals behind on sticky notes for students as a reminder of their learning. We offer them to students to make reminders for themselves or to leave thinking tracks in their texts as they read. And of course we couldn't confer without a trusty clipboard, fun pens, and some type of storage system, like a zipper case to keep all of our our conferring materials organized and ready on the go.

Having all of our materials gathered and in one consistent place, ensures that when independent reading time begins and we're setting off to confer. No time is wasted searching for that green pen or the blue pad of sticky notes.
Ideas to Get You Started
The more organized we are, the more time we can spend with our readers. The more time we have to spend with readers, the more impact we can have through conferring. The more conferring we do, the more we can support readers in developing skills for book finding, building reading lives, making meaning, solving problems, and connecting with other readers.
Treat Yourself to A Shopping Trip

Follow your instincts. Find tools you love and are excited to carry around and spend lots of time with.

There are as many preferences for conferring tools as there are conferring teachers. Christina writes in pencil. Kari loves a gel pen tied to her clipboard with a long piece of colorful string. You and your teaching colleagues may have different tool preferences, and that's ok. It's important you find what works for you.

Functional tools are critical. So figure out what really works for you on the go. If you find your tools aren't working for you, don't be afraid to experiment a bit until you find a better fit.

Find a special spot to keep your conferring materials. Label it. Once school starts you'll want to let all your students know about the importance of these tools and how you use them to support readers.

Kari thinks getting organized to confer is a legitimate reason to go shopping for some supplies. Christina sees it as opportunity to go scavenging through the school looking for castoffs or district supplied materials. Either way, our short list of essential tools for getting started includes:
Questions for Reflection

Clipboard or binder - This provides a hard writing surface and means to keep notes together. Some of you might opt to use a digital tool, instead.

Writing utensils - We like to keep a few different options at hand on the go.

Sticky notes - A a variety of shapes and sizes can be used to jot notes to yourself and leave behind as reminders, visuals, or annotation tools for your students.

Paper - We'll offer a few different tools for note taking that can be downloaded in our next post, Challenge #10: Select a tool for taking notes while you confer.

What's your favorite tool to write with? How can you make sure this tool is always at your fingertips while you confer?

What other conferring materials have you tried in the past? What worked for you? What might you experiment with to help yourself stay more organized?

What have your colleagues tried? What has worked and not worked for them?

Where might you keep your conferring tools, so they're always ready to grab and go when independent reading time begins?

Don't miss a single post in this series! Click on the FOLLOW button (on the side bar or below) to have every new challenge delivered right to your inbox.
We'd love to hear what's on your list to buy or find to get yourself organized for conferring? Come on over to on our Facebook group and tell us about your ideas! We want to see what you'll be carrying with you as you set out to confer this year.

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Challenge #9: Get organized for conferring.

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Challenge #9: Get organized for conferring. Start out by treating yourself to a few new conferring materials that you'll be excited to pick up and carry around every day of the school year. A colorful new clipboard? Some funky pens in your favorite colors, ink types, or styles?

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Challenge 10: "Select and Prepare Note Taking Tools for Conferring"

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Challenge 10: "Select and Prepare Note Taking Tools for Conferring"

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At the end of this blog, there are some helpful conferring forms. I particularly like the Four Square Conferring Note.

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Challenge #10: S elect a tool for taking notes while you confer. A commitment to confer is a commitment to responsive teaching. Yet, time is short, so if you want to get the best return on your investment of this time spent conferring, then you'll want to set yourself up with some sort of system for taking notes while you confer. Today's challenge is about taking time select and prepare a note taking tool so you're ready to capture your observations about readers from the first day of the school year.
We confer because we believe it is the best way to both know and nurture readers. We take notes because it allows us to hold onto and come back the ongoing wonderings, insights, and inklings that pop up in our conversations with readers, helping us better understand them and plan for the path ahead. Yates and Nosek, 2018 How Does This Help Grow A Community of Readers?
Conferring is an investment in our students. It is an opportunity to better know them as people and as readers. Each time we pull up alongside a young reader we are saying, "I'm here to learn about you so I can find ways to offer my partnership." Yet much of the impact of our conferring can be lost or diminished if remembering the important bits from a conference is left solely to the mercy of memory. Learning to jot a few simple notes can help you intensify your impact by connecting one conference to the next, like links on a chain: past, present, and future.

If you accepted the previous challenge, then you've already got a trusty clipboard or notebook that you're excited to carry around. Now all you need to do is select a tool to help you organize some notes as you go. Although there are an infinite number of possibilities for how to TAKE NOTE in a conference, the information most teachers find helpful and practical to record in a conference comes in response to one or more of the following questions:

What strengths or successes is the student demonstrating?

What teaching was offered today?

What next steps might be considered?

What am I still wondering about this reader?

In our book, To Know and Nurture a Reader: Conferring with Confidence and Joy, we offer some of our favorite tools for organizing your conferring notes (you can download these tools using the links at the bottom of this post).

This tool serves as a sort of bar graph showing how many conferences you've offered each child over time. To use it, simply jot each child's name or initials down the left hand side, and jot the date of each conference offered in one of the boxes next to the child's name. Of course the goal is Conferring Record Sheet - not to confer equally with each child, but this tool can sometimes uncover trends we wouldn't otherwise spot, such as students we've given more conferring time than intended and students we've somehow not spent much one on one time with at all.

Know and Nurture T-Chart - This tool is a two column T-chart. The KNOW column is for jotting what you've noticed or uncovered about what the child is already doing. The NURTURE column is for jotting ideas about how you plan to intentionally NURTURE the reader, either today in this conference, or in the future.

Four Square Grid - An alternative to the Know and Nurture T-Chart, this four part grid positions you to organize notes about observations and next steps into what we refer to as the four intentional directions for conferring: book choice, healthy habits, strategic process, and authentic response (We've got a chapter dedicated to each of these directions in our book). By organizing your notes in this way, you can quickly start to spot patterns, strengths, and ways to extend readers.

If these tools don't seem quite right for you, you might instead choose to simply start with blank sheet of paper, an electronic tablet, or a system you've designed yourself or learned from a colleague. The important thing is not which tool or system you use for taking notes, the important thing is that you choose something, have it right at your side as you interact with readers, and make it your own as you go.

Ideas to Get You Started

Jotting notes during a conference helps you remember, to note new learning, to make a plan for checking back, and a to make a plan for moving forward.

Once you've selected a note taking tool and have seen a class roster, prepare a copy for each child and place them in your conferring folder, clipboard, or binder so they're ready to go from the first day.

If you feel stressed and uncertain about the what and how of taking note in a conference, you aren't alone. But notes don't need to be fancy or detailed. These notes are for you, after all. They are a gift you give yourself in order to sort out what's worth remembering to help with planning, follow-up, reflection, problem-solving, and/or tracking progress.

Keep it simple. Cumbersome systems can detract from rather than support your interactions with students. When in doubt, start with a clipboard, blank paper, and a favorite writing tool. You'll discover what else you may need as you go.

Questions to Consider

As I consider the tools offered here, which do I feel most inclined to try out? What features appeal to me? Why?

What system do other teachers I know utilize?

What has worked for me in the past? What has gotten in the way of me taking meaningful notes? How might I adjust?

As I get to know my readers in the early days and weeks of the school year, what seems most important to remember to help plan for instruction?

How do I hope my notes can help me with follow up, problem-solving, and tracking progress?

Helpful Links
Today we share three different tools for organizing conferring notes.

We'd love to hear from you. What kind of note taking tool have you used in the past? What might you try this year? How will you start to make this challenge come to life?Come on over to our Facebook group to share your ideas!
Don't miss a single post in this series! Click on the FOLLOW button (on the side bar or below) to have every new challenge delivered right to your inbox.

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Challenge #10: Select a tool for taking notes while you confer.

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Challenge #10: Select a tool for taking notes while you confer. A commitment to confer is a commitment to responsive teaching. Yet, time is short, so if you want to get the best return on your investment of this time spent conferring, then you'll want to set yourself up with some sort of system for taking...

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Challenge 11: "Identify 3-5 Book Finding Strategies That Are Essential to Teach Students"

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Challenge 11: "Identify 3-5 Book Finding Strategies That Are Essential to Teach Students"

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Challenge #11: Identify 3- 5 book finding strategies that are essential for students in the ages and stages you work with. Map out a quick plan for how you you might model each of them for your students in the early days of the school year.
"If you don't like to read, you haven't found the right book." How Does This Help Grow A Community of Readers?
To cultivate a thriving community of readers one of our first priorities is to nurture each readers ability to find one book after another.

Before readers can settle into engaged and purposeful reading, they must find their way to texts that they can and want to read. When we commit to intentionally support book choice we are committing to helping readers learn to consistently find texts that lead to high levels of engagement.

In their landmark article, Every Child, Every Day, Richard Allington and Rachel E. Gabriel state that "The research. . . is robust and conclusive: Students read more, understand more, and are more likely to continue reading when they have the opportunity to choose what they read." We agree. We've seen the proof year after year.

Yet, developing the skills to select and curate a personal collection of independent reading materials is no easy task. In every classroom, every year, there are students who arrive not yet having the skills to navigate book choice on their own. This, of course, doesn't mean they can't handle choice reading; it simply means we have work to do -teaching book choosing skills and strategies, just as we would print work or comprehension, with purpose, patience, and persistence.

Take some time to think about the ways you make your own book selections. Below we list a few of the strategies we've noticed ourselves relying on as readers.

We ask a friend or colleague with similar tastes or interests for a recommendation.

We study the front, back and inside cover a of a book.

We page through a book and and give it a good two to four page try to get a taste.

We are always on the lookout for books that feed certain personal interests. For example, Christina loves narrative nonfiction about challenges of endurance and musician biographies while Kari has a profound interest in the stories of refugees and immigrants. Being able to name our own topics of interest to ourselves and others increases our success.

We rely on online sources such as blogs we follow, Goodreads, or the suggestions that pop up for us on Amazon or the iBooks store.

In our book, To Know and Nurture a Reader: Conferring with Confidence and Joy, we offer an entire chapter focused on unpacking the work of supporting readers with book choice. Within this chapter you can learn more about about the Book Choice Reflection Tool . This tool is designed to help facilitate reflection and talk about book choice, without the need to bring "levels" into the conversation with students. The tool supports the notion that "good fit" happens at the intersection of interest and readability, and that for every reader there is not one readability level that defines a "good fit," but instead, there is a wide range of suitable possibilities that range from relaxed reading to stretch reading.

This tool can be used successfully with readers of all ages, and can be paired with other lessons aimed at helping readers reflect on interest or readability. Christina uses the tool during two to three whole group lessons at the beginning of the school year, and then follows through with students in conferences. Making copies for students to tape into their reading notebook or book box provides an easy reference for students and a tool to rely on during book choice conversations in the conference. You can learn more about strategies and uses for the tool in Chapter 5 of To Know and Nurture a Reader.

What strategies we teach our students isn't nearly as important as the commitment to teach a variety of strategies for book finding across the year in a variety of instructional formats. In the initial weeks of school, you'll want to offer a number of lessons for the whole class, highlighting the strategies you consider to be most high leverage. Later, as more students are successfully finding a steady stream of engaging texts, you might utilize small groups for students need additional strategies or practice. And, it's not unusual to find a few students who need your ongoing partnership refining their book choosing skills across the entire school year. These students will definitely benefit from a frequent focus on book choice when you pull up alongside to confer with them.
Tips to Get Started

Make a list of book-finding strategies that you suspect might be most important to model in the early days of the school year.

Plan to build an anchor chart with your students (resist the urge to make it ahead of time), adding key language and visuals to represent each strategy taught. Choose a spot to post it where students can easily refer to it.

Adopt a multi-text approach. Make sure your students have more than one book at the ready at any give moment. See Challenge #4.

Don't limit your students' choices to books that fall only within a certain guided reading level. Remember, those levels are meant as tools for us as teachers, not limits on what kinds of books students can hold in their hands.

Make room for books to be read in a variety of ways (study the pictures, retell, read pieces and parts, reread multiple times). By doing so you'll open up a much wider range of possibility for book choice. By defining reading as engagement in meaning making, we can all outgrow the idea that books must all be ready word-by-word, cover-to-cover.

Take a look back at Challenge #7, focused on modeling and encouraging a culture of book talk. For many readers, there is no more powerful strategy for book choice than following the recommendation of a peer.

Be prepared to embrace the messiness of choice, viewing imperfect choices as formative data and a chance to get to know what additional supports readers need. Every book choice tells a story and helps us better understand the teaching we might next offer.

Questions to Consider

What book finding strategies will you explicitly model for your students in the early days of the school year?

How might you introduce each strategy to students? Whole group lessons, in small groups, or even with individual conferences that turn into group conferences for all the readers nearby?

How might you help students remember the strategies taught? A classroom anchor chart? Student made notes or reminders? A page in their reading notebooks? A sticky note taped to their book boxes, perhaps?

Do you have a space on your classroom wall, preferably in the library, to house a chart that lists strategies taught?

How might you challenge yourself to be on the lookout for new book finding strategies to introduce across time?

How will you leverage whole group, small group, and conferring to grow book choice skills?

Helpful Links Choosing the Right Book: Strategies for Beginning Readers from read.write.think.org Choosing Choice: How Research and Best Practices Changed My Teaching Help Students Make Good Reading Choices: A Teacher Tip from Fountas & Pinnell on Independent Reading
We'd love to hear from you. How do you, as an adult reader, find books? What steps to you plan to take to help your students find a steady stream of engaging books this year? Come on over and join the conversation in our Facebook group.
Don't miss a post in this series! Click on the Follow link (on the side bar or below) to have every new challenge delivered right to your email inbox.

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Challenge #11: Identify 3- 5 book finding strategies that are essential to teach.

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Challenge #11: Identify 3- 5 book finding strategies that are essential for students in the ages and stages you work with. Map out a quick plan for how you you might model each of them for your students in the early days of the school year.

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Challenge 12: "Map out 3-4 Ways You Want to Encourage Healthy Reading Habits Beyond the School Day"

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Challenge 12: "Map out 3-4 Ways You Want to Encourage Healthy Reading Habits Beyond the School Day"

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Challenge #12: Map out 3-5 ways you want to encourage healthy habits beyond the school day. Make plans for how you will encourage wide, high volume reading inside and outside the classroom this year, encouraging students to set goals, make plans, reflect, and adjust.
"Good habits formed at youth make all the difference." -Aristotle How Does This Help Grow A Community of Readers?
An intentional focus on healthy habits is a commitment to empower students to take charge of their own reading lives, learning to make choices, design plans, and set goals that will help them develop and sustain a habit of joyful and purposeful reading throughout their lifetimes.

The essential question we use to consider if students need more nurturing and support with the development of reading habits is this:
Is the reader making intentional decisions that result in lots of time spent reading both in and out of school?
Until the answer to this question is a resounding, "YES!" we'll want to keep looking for ways to help reading take hold across a student's life. Designated time for self-selected reading within the school day is critical. But, to nurture and sustain reading lives of their own, students need to learn the habits, both the why and the how, to carry on as readers outside the walls of school, when we are not right there with them.

Students who read in the summer aren't prone to the debilitating grip of the summer slide. Summer reading habits can be developed from the very first day of school year.

So before you ever even meet your students, you'll want spend some time reflecting on how you'll encourage, model and support them in taking charge of building thriving reading lives, the kind that outstretch and outlast their time with us.

In the initial weeks of the school year, you might offer lessons aimed at:
Ideas to Get Started

Choosing reading spots that really work, both in and out of school.

Making choices and specific plans that result in lots time spent reading, both in and out of school.

Making plans and setting goals for themselves as readers (both in and out of school).

Connecting with other readers to reflect on reading habits and adjust when needed. For example, in Christina's classroom, students check in with each other to reflect on what they've read at home the night before. Or, if no reading took place, they take time to help each other think about what could be adjusted tonight to make more time for reading.

Questions to Consider

Consider giving up the old and tired daily reading log signed by parents. We all know this isn't an honest picture of anything aside from which parents remember to sign the form, and which ones don't. Instead, work with kids to develop a why and a how for being readers outside of the classroom.

Help students plan, reflect, and adjust rather than telling them what to do. For example, if a student's reading space doesn't seem to be working, it will be more productive for him in the long run if you can guide him through a reflective conversation about what does and doesn't work, than to simply assign him to a different sport.

Pay attention to the kind of space that works best for you as a reader. Soft or hard? Bright light or soft light? Open space or enclosed space? Chair or floor? Inside or outside? Now, help students notice and name the same sorts of preferences for themselves.

Make reading outside of the school day something you celebrate every morning of the school year, by highlighting examples or starting the day with a turn-and-talk that gets kids sharing with each other.

Help students make very concrete plans about their reading lives outside of school, envisioning every detail. When? Where? With whom?

Accept and encourage read aloud as a form of at home reading for any age or stage of reader. Making reading at home a joyful meaning making experience is the goal.

Helpful Links Why I Ditched the At-Home Reading Log 10 Ways to Ditch that Reading Log from Middle School Mind Blog

How much do I hope my students will read in school each day? Outside of school? On the weekends? On holiday breaks?

How can I help students who don't have a lot of at home support, in taking charge of their own planning for out of school reading?

What sort of goal setting and plan making have I modeled for my students? What would be some examples of goals and plans I could share with them?

While encouraging high volume reading, what can I do to make sure numbers of pages, books, or minutes don't become a more important outcome that engaged meaning making?

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We'd love to hear from you. What are some healthy reading habits you wish to foster in your students this year? How might you get started with this important work? Please share some of your thinking with our Facebook group. We want to learn from you.

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Challenge #12: Map out 3-4 ways you want to encourage healthy reading habits beyond the school day.

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Challenge #12: Map out 3-5 ways you want to encourage healthy habits beyond the school day. Make plans for how you will encourage wide, high volume reading inside and outside the classroom this year, encouraging students to set goals, make plans, reflect, and adjust. __________________________________________________________ "Good habits formed at youth make all the difference."

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Challenge 13: "Trust Yourself and Keep Growing All Year Long:)"

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Challenge 13: "Trust Yourself and Keep Growing All Year Long:)"

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Challenge #13: Trust yourself and keep growing all year long.
Challenge #13: Trust yourself and keep growing all year long. Cultivating a community of readers is a year long labor of love. It starts before you ever even meet this year's students and doesn't end until the last good-byes in May or June.
"There is not one right or wrong way to do this work. So loosen up, have some fun, and when in doubt trust your instincts to follow your students." -Kari Yates & Christina Nosek
We're delighted you decided to be part of this challenge.

We hope the challenges we posed have affirmed many of the things you're already working so hard to do, given you some ideas of how to refine others, and maybe planted a few ideas about ways you might stretch yourself in the weeks and months ahead.

The thirteen challenges together are meant to help you lay the foundation for a building a vibrant community of readers this year. Of course each of these ideas is simply a starting point. The real trick is to keep your courage and your energy high throughout the entire school year, as you work to help readers thrive, not only as individuals, but as true members of a community of readers.

And it's probably no secret that we believe one of the best ways to do that is to spend time every day conferring with readers. Each time your students set out with their self-selected texts for independent treading, we hope you'll set out with your conferring tools, pulling up alongside each of them in partnership, committing to to both know and nurture them as readers and as people. By trusting your your students to lead you, we believe you'll grow a thriving community of readers- one one child, one moment at a time, one conversation at a time.

Embrace the messiness of choice. Commit to love every child in your class. Trust your students to lead. Trust yourself to respond. Engage in self-care.

We think we can hear the children coming...

It's time to go and get books in their hands!
All Challenges in the Series Challenge #1: Make a Pledge to Nurture Self-selected Independent Reading Every Day Challenge #2: Make sure your classroom library is in tiptop shape, well-stocked, well-organized, accessible, and appealing Challenge #3: Prepare displays, table baskets, book shelves, or stacks of enticing books. Challenge #4: Make a Plan for Student Storage and Management of Self-selected Texts Challenge #5: Start Taking Note of the Authentic Ways You Respond to Your Own Reading Challenge #6: Start Creating a Thoughtful Stack of Books You Can't Wait to Read Aloud to Your Students Challenge #7: Make a List of Books you Want to Highlight Through Book Talks in the First Month of School Challenge #8: Envision the ways you will encourage and nurture interactions within your community of readers Challenge #9: Get organized for conferring! Challenge #10: Select and prepare note taking tools for conferring Challenge #11: Identify 3- 5 book finding strategies that are essential for students in the ages and stages you work with Challenge #12: Map out 3-5 ways you want to encourage healthy habits beyond the school day

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Challenge #13: Trust yourself and keep growing all year long.

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Challenge #13: Trust yourself and keep growing all year long. Cultivating a community of readers is a year long labor of love. It starts before you ever even meet this year's students and doesn't end until the last good-byes in May or June. __________________________________________________________ "There is not one right or wrong way to do this...