Loving Literature Together

As a former classroom teacher, I'm somewhat embarrassed to admit that one of the things to get bumped out of our schedule during a hectic week was the read aloud. I know, it's the last thing that should go but in the rush to complete, reflect, post, it was often done.

I'm not alone in this and that's why having a good old 'Drop, Everything, And Read' session to celebrate International Litearcy Day worked.  It was heartening to see the number of classes who participated, and enjoyed doing it. Teachers and students alike kicked back, relaxed and read.

DEAR sessions have their place in the world, and this is the 5th country in which I've tried it. An important component for teachers participating is to model, either by reading aloud or reading along side the students.  The students need freedom to enjoy as well, and should be able to read whatever genre or format they wish. Too much structure destroys the joy of these sessions.

The video below shows us loving literature together.



Comments

Post a Comment

Sharing is caring! If you have a comment or feedback, I'd love to hear it.

Popular posts from this blog

Note-Taking: Print vs. Digital

Image
As a one to one iPad school, our students are certainly mobile learners and as educators, we are navigating the waters of what is best for our students in terms when should learning use digital tools vs. old school. From my latest dabblings into Twitter blogs such as Jennifer Gonzalez's fabulous post on note-taking  where she expounds the virtues of sketch noting but also has a word of caution for us sailing the digital waters in that the research against digital note-taking is young. Her post is definitely worth reading and it has me reflecting on my own practice as a teacher librarian who over the last couple of weeks has taught both sketch note-taking and digital note-taking. My recent exploration in a Twitter book club which is reading Maryanne Wolf's "Reader Come Home: The Reading Brain in the Digital World" provides an interesting insight in all the different ways as mature learners we are reading the text and taking notes. For myself, I'm using my phone
Read more

Critical Thinking Skills and the Common Core

Image
Book Clubs are one of my favourite parts of my role, it's great to sit down and chat with the kids and get down to a deeper level. As any teacher will tell you, kids will always surprise you with where their thinking goes and the connections or insights they can make. Being a Teacher Librarian and Literacy Coordinator has encouraged me to examine the  Common Core  standards more closely and how it meshes with our library standards, which are a marriage of the   ALA , the  ISTE / NETS  plus a few others.  For years I've used good old ' Blooms Taxonomy ' to help me with activities for my reading workshop so naturally I used it when planning my books clubs.  As I was perusing the Common Core standards I was rather surprised by how limited the standards were in terms of critical thinking skills. I was running a workshop about books clubs and made a quick keyword chart based on the Blooms Taxonomy Rose and CC standards. What I found was that there were plenty of standards in
Read more