Reading in the Wild: Wild Readers Share Books {Chapter 3}

Welcome back! I’m so excited to be caught up with this book study. I promise to get my guided math posts off the ground soon! 🙂

Our fearless leaders this week are…

This week’s topic – Sharing Books and Reading With Other Readers – is an area I need to grow in as a reading teacher. I don’t give my students enough time to share books they’ve read with their classmates. If and when I find myself back in the classroom, this will be a top priority for me as a reading teacher.

I added a page to the freebie pack that I have used in the past, just not recently. It was a recommendation chart that hung on the back of our classroom door. I think this would be a really neat tool in a departmentalized setting as well. I would love to see my kiddos recommending books to one another across classes. 🙂

I added a new page on top whenever we needed it.  The kids loved looking to see if someone had left them a note, and it promoted titles within our classroom.

One of the things I did encourage on a regular basis was for my students to read together – as buddies, in trios, or in groups. I found that this did 2 important things for my students:

1. It helped my students who were embarrassed, or reluctant, to get excited about reading to do just that. We had several mini-lessons about buddy reading behaviors, but after a few weeks my students were much better about making their buddy reading time productive. 

2. It gave my struggling readers access to texts that they would not be able to read successfully on their own. This was a huge confidence booster! Their friends were encouraging and excited to read with them, making the texts they chose together much less intimidating. 

If you’d like to check out my other posts in this series, please see:

Wild Readers Dedicate Time to Read {Chapter 1}
Creating a Workshop Schedule That Works For You {Chapter 1}
Wild Readers Self-Select Reading Material {Chapter 2}
Curating a Classroom Library {Chapter 2}

Make sure you click on the picture above to grab the updated freebie pack, and visit the rest of our Reading in the Wild posts below! This is some of the best professional development I do all summer! 🙂