One of my favorite ways to kick off the school year is with our Back to School Book Challenge! It’s easy, free, and fun….and I’ll tell you a few other reasons why I love it and how you can do it in your classroom this year!
Book Challenge Benefits!!
Goal Setting
This is a fun and informal way to start talking about goals with young students. We talk about how many days we will work and how many books we have. We count the tallies and figure how many more books we have to go. We work hard to squeeze in reading opportunities so we will meet our goal by Friday of the first week!
Community and Team Building
Our very first opportunity to work together as a class! We pat ourselves on the back and give a round of applause as we work together to listen, enjoy and discuss our books!
Learn to Love Books and Reading Time
I choose books that I truly LOVE for this challenge and I tell them why I love those books. We take time to discuss what they love about the books, share any connections they make, and then I put them in a “Class Favorites” tub for them to read at their leisure! I choose funny books, books with lessons, books with great messages of acceptance, books about overcoming challenges, and more!
The research has told us a lot of little ones are not getting the “lap time” they need at home where they share meaningful reading time with a parent, so this is how I try to combat this in the classroom! It’s a great start and we can refer back to these books often!
Introduce a Bunch of Books in a Short Time
This is a great way to introduce a bunch of fantastic books in a short amount of time. I’m able to introduce favorite authors and series that the kids can find in our school and classroom libraries and are great for young readers! Many of these become favorites right away!
Teach Listening Expectations
This is a great time to introduce and practice our classroom listening rules. I always ask students to let me know if they have read the book before and we talk about how we don’t want to ruin it for others. We also talk about making connections in our mind rather than shouting out. I make sure to stop and let kids share a bit with the group or with a partner. We also talk about “real laughs” versus “fake laughs” 🙂 If you’ve ever taught young ones, you’ll know that they can do a really obnoxious, “I’m the loudest laugher” laugh and it drives me bonkers!
Here’s a picture of my Listening Rules chart that I refer to before every read aloud and lesson! (I have a similar one in my store if you’re interested!)
Start Tackling Standards
During these read alouds, you can start practicing…
- Asking questions
- Answering questions
- Retelling stories
- Discussing characters, setting, and events
- Review the parts of a book (cover, spine, title, author, illustrator, etc.)
- Discuss lessons or messages in the books
- Decide if a book is fiction or informational
- Examine illustrations
- Compare and contrast characters
- Talk about who is telling the story
- Predicting
- Sharing opinions and reasons
- And… students are listening to a fluent and expressive reader!!
Interested? Here is how it works….
- Grab 20-25 (depending on how long your first week of school is) of your favorite books that you love for back to school, friendship, acceptance, and any other topics that are great for the beginning of the year!
- Stack them up front by your teaching area.
- Tell your students that you are going to work together to try to meet the challenge of reading them all by the end of the week!
- Squeeze in read aloud time whenever you can throughout the busy first week! Sometimes, it’s a good “settle down” activity if you’ve been doing other activities.
- Make a tally for each book you read and celebrate with some raucous cheering when you reach your goal! Enjoy!
I’d love to hear from you if you try this out or if you do something similar in your classroom!
Happy Teaching!
Jennifer ~ Practical Primary Teacher
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