Today’s focus for Book Club is on the book, Sarah Plain and Tall, which is an easy read I selected to read with my students during the M-Th 30 minute class sessions. Continue reading
Sarah Plain & Tall – KWL Chart
Book Club
Contemporary Music & Reading
“Hey, can I talk to you for a minute?” I pulled one of my Book Club students aside after class. He had been dozing on and off the entire thirty minutes (yes, Book Club is only thirty minutes) and I wanted to see what was up. “Look,” I said, “I know you’re tired, but it hurts my feelings when you fall asleep during my class. What if you were telling me a story about your weekend and I closed my eyes and started snoring. How would you feel?” Continue reading
Text-to-World Connections
As my Book Club students grasped text-to-self connections, it was time to move to text-to-world. To help them understand this, I created a PowerPoint/Google Presentation and walked through it with them. Continue reading
Connecting to Novel Characters
Making connections while reading is hard! That’s why I created this resource to help not only my struggling readers in Book Club, but for for any struggling reader or young reader (fifth grade through eighth grade). This simple, yet deeper-thinking worksheet helps students create text-to-self connections while reading. Continue reading
“Piano Lessons” – Close Reading & Question Set
Ahhh…close reading passages, a necessary evil. Students aren’t big fans of close reading, but these mini-readings are important for their skill building, especially if there is a set of questions that are relevant to the skills they are practicing. Continue reading
Monster in the Barn
For Book Club, I’m always looking for good resources to help my students make connections to their reading. I came across this great source from ReadWorks, and I created two sets of questions to correspond and help with text-to-self and text-to-world connections! Continue reading
Poetry Connections
Making text-to-self connections can be pretty simple when you’re working with a story, explanatory text, or short passage. Poetry, on the other hand, can be a challenge. That’s why I wanted to specifically work on this with my Book Club students. Continue reading
Connecting to Holes, by Louis Sachar
Who doesn’t like the book Holes, by Louis Sachar? This is one of my favorite books from my elementary/middle school years. And because it’s such a good book, I wanted my Book Club kids to connect to a descriptive passage in it. Continue reading
My Favorite Book
My Book Club is made of eighth grade Reading Intervention students who really struggle with reading. One of my girls told me, point blank on the first day, “I don’t read.” My goal is to change that by making reading fun and by caring about the students and working with them individually over the course of the three/four weeks. Continue reading