One year in Chicago, I received a Boundless Readers grant and having received this grant, I was given the opportunity to learn from some of the most amazing teachers in the district. I was focused on how we can get students to become better readers in one of the professional development sessions. One of the many take-aways from this session was this ever-changing anchor chart:
It provides the whole class with a number of suggestions if they ever run of books to read and it also gives me a quick assessment of what students are reading and how long they've been reading the same book. I hope that this is not a stagnant chart, but one that will be used to its fullest capacity!
Speaking of being readers...we tracked our reading stamina the first eight days of school. Here is what we saw:
We started reading with 22 minutes the very first day of school, without any interruptions, talking, getting up, etc... We had a hiccup the second day, but was able to learn from our mistakes and ended up reading for a total of 62 minutes the last day (not shown on graph)! Whoa, we definitely are or going to be readers in 5th grade!
Not only did we talk about being able to read for a long period of time, but we also talked about having the right fit book. We did an activity where we hid one of our shoes and someone else found it and...tried it on! Guess what? We don't all have the same size feet! Some shoes were too small, some shoes were too big, and some shoes really smelled! This demonstration helped us understand that there are books that are not the right fit for us and we have to find the books that match our reading levels!
