Mysteries! Detectives! Reading! Oh My! (Part 2)

Celebrating Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month

This project is a part of the Hispanic & Latinx Heritage Month celebration because it supports a Latino teacher or a school where the majority of students are Latino.

My Students

Help solve the mystery of how to get third graders to become strong, independent, thoughtful readers! What do they need? Here's a clue: they need lots and lots and lots of things made from paper, ink and glue. The solution? They need books! They need mystery books!

My students are eight and nine years old, attending a public charter school in Washington DC.

They are eager to please and are figuring out who they are as people and as students. They love to talk, play together, and they work hard! They are a diverse group of kids: racially, socio-economically and academically. Among the 51 third graders I teach, there are students reading at a first grade reading level, at a fourth grade reading level, and everything in between. Every single one of them is determined to become a better reader this year, and they devour books.

My Project

Our next reading unit capitalizes on three truths: kids love mysteries; there are lots of mystery books written for third grade readers, and reading mysteries requires practicing key reading skills like envisioning, predicting and making inferences. Research shows that the most effective reading instruction matches kids to books at their reading level, allows them to choose the titles they read, and involves lots of student conversation about reading. With this project, I am requesting enough books to ensure that all of my students will be able to choose exciting mystery books to read at the same time as their reading partners. My students will be able to practice vital reading skills and talk about the books with their partners. With these books, each of my third graders will be able to read several mystery books during the month of January so that they can work toward becoming better, stronger, more engaged readers for the rest of their lives.

This is the second part of a project to stock our classroom library with high-interest books that students will read, talk about, and learn from.

The next reading unit focuses on reading mysteries, and the students will be practicing important reading skills throughout. These books will impact not just this year's group of kids, but third graders for many more years to come.