Once Upon an Insatiable Class of Readers: We Need Books!
My students need 47 books by incredible authors such as Mo Willems, Oliver Jeffers, and Peter Brown to improve our fluency and connections with stories.
After reading books from "Picture Books Teach Us 1000s of Lessons!", we just can't get enough of these books! While it's certainly important for readers to read books on their levels, we still need books that are fun and engaging that help us become life-long readers.
Most of my kids come from immigrant families with hardworking families who are doing their best to provide the best for their kids.
With many coming from an impoverished background, some students are raised by their extended family because their parents need to work many, often late, hours to support the household. Thus, families often turn to the school and classrooms to provide eye-opening experiences and to help their children grow socially and emotionally, as well as academically.
My Project
The books from "Picture Books Teach Us 1000s of Lessons!" are favorites among my students. Now that we've read and reread those books, it's time to expose them to even more books! Many of these books use humor as a vehicle to teach social skills and to appreciate each other and the everyday, little pleasures.
In addition to learning valuable life-long social skills, students will learn to read with longer phrases and with fluency. Having fun books to read are an important resource to help encourage them on their journey to become life-long readers.
Within the classroom, I am trying to expose the students to as many different and fun books as I can. My students relish the time of day when I break out a new, fun read aloud - a read aloud with the sole purpose of listening and enjoying. This time allows the kids to simply be kids and enjoy sitting close to me and listen to a story.
My students won't remember the mini-lesson where I'm teaching them about reading a fiction book or decoding unknown words.
What they will remember are the stories that we read - the stories that they connected with, that remind them of themselves, that show how characters interact and have fun, that show characters doing what's morally right.
These stories help children envision important values and skills to have throughout life.
Besides, authors are much better story-tellers than I am!
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As a teacher-founded nonprofit, we're trusted by thousands of teachers and supporters across the country. This classroom request for funding was created by Ms. Liang and reviewed by the DonorsChoose team.
