Teaching Thought #51

Teacherscribe's Teaching Thought #51

Put an end to fake reading in your classroom.

Thought #2 – Give students ready access to books.

From the link - There’s something powerful about having a good book immediately available to hand a student. I’m constantly on the lookout for books from yard sales, thrift stores, used bookstores, and student donations, but last year I discovered DonorsChoose.org, and it has vastly improved the health and appeal of my classroom collection of books.

I asked my students to list books they’d like to read on my classroom whiteboard and tapped into the young adult book recommendations of my teacher friends on social media. In less than half an hour, I set up a Donors Choose project, and with a little bit of social media sharing and the help of some generous donors, I had boxes of crisp, new books for my students to open with great anticipation.

I love this idea.  I’ve built up a considerable classroom library, which I usually use for my College Comp II class when they do their Sticky-Note book report unit.  This is where I could really use the list of books idea.

Once I have the books, what works best for me is to give a note card to my students.  On this I have them list three topics they love to learn about or are interested in. And I have them list three that they absolutely don’t want to read about.  From this, I select a couple books for them to select from. And I bet at least 90 percent of the students enjoy the book they end up with.