LOL Librarian

Book Clubs are a wonderful! Today my students chanted their favourite authors name like they were cheerleading squad. I have been working on a Newbery Book Club with Gr. 4 and Gr. 5 students. My students are a mixture from a variety of classes and are the strong readers. The students really enjoyed working with kids they don't normally get to work with and they really pushed each other in their thinking. Seeing them only once a week was a bit challenging at first, I was accustom to more of a guided reading format where I saw them a couple times a week. However, we soon settled into a routine. They finished an award winning novel every week, they found it to hard to stop part way through, but it worked since our discussions drew upon a wider variety of books. My enthusiastic readers consumed quality and award winning literature! My goal was to have them read more deeply and focus on analysis and evaluation. We looked at different themes in books, created video reviews and then comp...

Teachers know that the best way for our students to learn is to make it enjoyable. Sometimes, this is a challenge since not everyone likes the same thing. This video,  What Kids Want Out of School? , of middle school students shows what our leaners would like. The answer to this is we attempt to make tasks inquiry based, meaning we allow students to make guided choices about what they want to learn. We also like to ensure our students have an authentic voice in the process. This links to my former posting about reading contests. For the Golden Dragon Book Award I'm using Google Classroom to stay organized. To further motivate my students and encourage them to build a reading community I'm giving my students different options to share their opinions. Currently, the students are expected to evaluate their books using criteria set by myself and I created a template for them to use and an example video (seen below). They need to discuss the genre, characters, author's style, co...