Top 10 (or more!) Back to School Read Alouds: Love of Reading

For more on building a reading life, visit my past posts, including "Building a Reading Life~Tip Time."

What read alouds are your MUST READS during the first few weeks of school? In the next few weeks, I am going to share groups of read alouds that I use for various purposes at the beginning of the year.

One of the main focuses of my read alouds for the first few weeks of school is a "love of reading." Here are some of my favorite read alouds to use to provide students with a variety of perspectives on having a great reading life and developing (or continuing) an appreciation for and love of reading:

•Aunt Chip and the Triple Creek Dam Affair, Patricia Polacco
(All time favorite for Reading Life!) What happens to a town when a tv tower comes along? Books become furniture, props, pot-hole fillers. Can Aunt Chip, the town's old librarian bring Triple Creek back to life with a love of story, books, and the printed word? 

•Thank You, Mr. Falker, Patricia Polacco
I'm sure you are familiar with this one, but Patricia Polacco was a struggling reader herself. Mr. Faulker was a teacher who made a difference in her reading life.

•The Bee Tree, Patricia Polacco
When Mary-Ellen gets tired of reading, grandfather shows her how to follow the bees to a tree with honey. "Just like we ran after the bees to find their tree, so you must also chase these things adventure, knowledge, and wisdom through the pages of a book!"

•More than Anything Else, Marie Bradby
During Emancipation, Booker T Washington pursues learning to read. This reminds me of one of my favorite reading quotes, "Once you learn to read, you will forever be free!" (Frederick Douglass)

•That Book Woman, Heather Henson
That Book Woman makes her rounds throughout Appalachia and turns the most uninterested child into a reader.

•The Wretched Stone, Chris Van Allsburg
The Wretched Stone entrances everyone when it is found. The men on this ship turn into monkeys and have a hard time thinking and remembering anything after watching the wretched stone for hours. (This is great for making inferences and discussing figurative vs literal--the wretched stone is a figurative television. Re-read the book after figuring this out to show students all the things Chris Van Allsburg says about the "wretched" television.)

•Richard Wright and the Library Card, William Miller
What if you didn't have the right to get a library card? What if a love of reading was something you had to pursue with perseverance and at the risk of being caught? Our students don't know how blessed they are to have parents and teachers who try to instill in them a love of reading and who help them pursue reading, no matter their struggles. (set in the 1920's segregated south, Richard eventually learns to read and becomes a writer.)

•The Librarian of Basra, Jeanette Winter  and Alia’s Mission: Saving the Books of Iraq, Mark Alan Stamaty
When Alia, a librarian and lover of books, is caught in the war zone of Iraq, her love of reading transcends her fear of danger. She saves 30,000 books from being destroyed. These two books tell the same story, but Alia's Mission is more of a graphic novel.

•The Wednesday Surprise, Eve Bunting
This book has a twist. The granddaughter and grandmother read together every week. Throughout the book, you may be thinking the granddaughter is learning to read, but at the end you find out she has been teaching the grandmother how to read. Great for discussing illiteracy.

•Amber on the Mountain, Tony Johnston
Another story set in Appalachia. Anna comes along and teaches Amber how to read.

•The Library, Sarah Stewart
Elizabeth is a true bibliophile, so much so that her house is overflowing with books. Eventually, she has to figure out what to do with all of her books. This is a quick read in poetic form. Easy to squeeze in at some point during my back to school week!

• Please Bury Me in the Library, J Patrick Lewis (poetry)
Mix up your love of reading discussions and read alouds with a little poetry. Some of my favorites from this book are "Are You a Book Person?" and  "Please Bury Me in the Library."

This past week, I worked on polishing a "Reading Life" packet to help me with my first few weeks back to school. I created 15 reflection templates (in 1/2 page form) and 16 quotations about reading (these are in poster form and in a form that you can print for students to put into a reader response). This set of journal sheets and quotations are meant to initiate discussions and minilessons about a love of reading and to lead your students in carving out time for the best reading life they have ever had. I also like to participate in this reflection and share my own "reading life" goals with students (like trying to read more for myself, trying to read a book that one of them has recommended to me, etc.) IF YOU HAVE PURCHASED THIS PRODUCT, IT RECEIVED A BEAUTIFUL REVISION 6/26/2016, so please go re-download in your tpt account!

I made sheets of the quotations so that I can copy them and give them to students to analyze, to help us have discussions, and most importantly, to help me learn more about their reading lives so that I will have some ideas about how to help them have the best reading life ever!

I created 15 1/2 sheets to go into the "reading life" section of their journals. I will not use all of these at the beginning of the year, but I thought that the ones I do not use early in the year would be great for "boosters" when we need to revisit our reading life conversation (for example, when we return from our first break or as "New Year's" reflections for reading.

Last year, I called my Reading Life unit "Coaching Your Own Reading Life." I decided to divide students' reader response notebooks into four sections (these are included in my reading life product):

What is the purpose of each section?

My Reading Life holds beginning of the year “Reading Life” journal prompts, responses to quotes, and can contain responses to the end of classroom read alouds. We use an “I remember” structure to celebrate and respond to a book when we finish it.

Coach’s Huddle: a place to put handouts from the teacher, record notes from mini-lessons,etc.

Practice Time!: In this section, students respond to the classroom read aloud; it is used as a space for active engagement during mini-lessons and for students to practice a concept with teacher support.

Game Time: When students respond to their own reading (or book club books,) it’s GAME TIME. This is when students take what they have learned about reading and apply it with their own responses.

Students started to run out of pages in their marble notebooks this year. Some students glued another marble notebook to their first, so this year, I am just going to have everyone glue two together from the beginning of the year. How exciting! (Maybe I will tell you more about how much I LOOOOOOVED reader response this year~we instituted a 10 minute write right after minilesson and it did WONDERS!)

I hope you LOVE LOVE LOVE reading as much as I do. And, I especially love to turn my struggling, apathetic readers into READERS for life. I hope I am ready for whatever challenges my students have in store for me this year...only 7 more days until the first day of school! :)

Monday's Minilesson Magic: Connecting to the Character's World

Welcome back for another "Monday's Minilesson Magic." I imagine it's that time of the year where you are working on fiction and thinking about characters in the story. Last year, my students and I learned from the Lucy Calkin's unit called "Following Character's Into Meaning." I called my unit:

The unit focuses heavily on learning about the characters world, living in their shoes, and being able to understand the character's motivations and reasons for their actions. I loved, loved, loved this unit, although we made modifications to the Lucy book along the way, I think it gave me new minilessons and I LOVE the sections on confering with readers and assessing students (not testing, but really getting at what they know or don't quite have yet).

Anyway, I think I digressed :)  From this unit,  my students and I were introduced to The Tiger Rising by Kate Dicamillo. OMG, if you have not read this book, please grab a copy now--one that you can write in if you read like me and love to underline and take notes about what you want to remember when you are reading it with your students. I am totally one of the SLOWEST readers, and I totally read this book trying to cherish every paragraph and every word, and I think I finished the book in about 2 hours. If you are not a slow reader like me, you can probably finish the book in one hour...Time well spent if a you are a lover of children's literature. This book definitely kept students wanting to listen for more!

The lesson I want to highlight today is how to help students "Walk in the Character's World." I guess what students are really doing in this lesson is comparing and contrasting the character's world to the world we live in. Here's our poster of Rob's World and Experiences VS My World and Experiences.

This poster is based on our reading of the first few (VERY SHORT) chapers of the book where we see Rob get bullied on the bus, we know it happens everyday, and we know the bus driver just ignores it.  Rob is also living in the Kentucky Star Motel with his dad because his mother died a few months ago of cancer. (OMG--can I do an it's about of The Tiger Rising? It's about grief; it's about different ways people deal with their problems--Rob stuffs his in an imaginary suitcase and Sistine lets hers explode; it's about the power of love and friendship; it's about how family doesn't always have to be blood related; it's about being new to a school/town; it's about sadness; it's about the rights of animals...) Can you tell how much we LOVE this book in my class? The story stayed with us ALL year! (and this year too!)

Okay, back to the minilesson. So, I chose these two details from the book to compare to my world. I told students that in my world, adults stand up for kids when they are getting bullied. In yellow, you can see where I pushed myself to think more about this and I said "This makes me think Rob must feel ALONE, INVISIBLE, and like noone cares."  For the living in a motel detail, I said it makes me think that a motel is not a place you stay for long, but Rob and his dad have been there for months. It's like they are stuck.

The next step to this lesson would be for students to create a chart like this to think about the world the characters in their independent books are living in. My students also continued this chart as I read aloud The Tiger Rising to push their thinking and give them a place for all of their great thoughts.

What do you think? Is this a lesson you normally teach? Have you read The Tiger Rising? Do you love it as much as my kiddos and I do?