I am now halfway through this school year, so I thought I'd share how it's going.
My students really embraced the challenge. It's amazing how motivated students can be when you create a challenge. They want to add more books to their chart. They want to add more stickers to our class chart. We have a display in the hallway that they want to add to. They want to know that we've read more books than the other classes. I also always remind them that the only way to become better readers is to READ.
They have been doing great! We did have to have a discussion about them trying to read more on their level or slightly higher to challenge themselves instead of only reading books that were too easy. Every single one of my students has been reading whole books. They spend 20-30 minutes every day reading in our class. When they finish early or if we get interrupted, most of them pull out a book. When they had their midyear benchmark, all of their fluency and retell levels increased. I look forward to getting their quarterly benchmark test results to see if those improved as well. As a class, we've read over 500 books!
*You, the teacher, be excited about reading! I would share with the class when I finished a book. Whenever we finished a book as a class, we added it to our list. I read to them all the time.
*Teach your students how to find books that are a good fit for them.
*I have a sign up sheet for my students when they finish a book or two so that they can tell me about the book before I sign off on it on their chart and give them their sticker for the class chart.
*Instead of doing 1 star sticker for each book, we change a certain number out for different color stars. This helps them with some math skills. Overall, there's nothing that I would change.
Before our break, we had a day to celebrate how well they'd done. We spent some time reading independently. I read a book to them. We had a guest reader and we had food! I look forward to the end of the year when we're going to have an even bigger celebration.
I'm well aware that cake decorating is not my talent. All that matters is that it tasted GOOD!
Sorry...I'm not sharing their cute little faces on my blog, but we each wrote how many books we've read and decorated it. I'm so proud of them!
If you're a teacher, how do you motivate your students to read? If you're a parent, how do you motivate your children to read? Were you motivated to read as a child?
2 comments:
Wow you must be proud. This looks like an amazing challenge and totally getting me in the mood to read haha!
That sounds like such a cool challenge--one I know I would have been excited about at a kid because I loved any excuse to read more! I think you're doing a great job!
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