#5BookFriday and It's Monday, What Are You Reading?

So if you are looking for a way to build a lot of excitement in your classroom around reading, try #5BookFriday and a weekly rendition of It's Monday, What Are You Reading? These are two literacy ideas that I saw this year from reading literacy blogs and looking at Twitter. I learned about both of these ideas from the blog https://innovateigniteinspire.wordpress.com/ by Kristin Ziemke and Katie Muhtaris. I tried both of these ideas in the classroom in January and they sure have evolved!

#5BookFriday

One of our 1st weeks of #5BookFriday!

My students LOVED #5BookFriday so much that they would eagerly anticipate Friday afternoon just to hear about the latest 5 books! I would pick out 5 books that I wanted to share with the class and motivate them to read. I would pull either new books that I had ordered through Scholastic, new books from our school library, old favorites of mine that I felt needed a special "look at" from the students,  or a theme of books around a certain topic or genre. After about 6 weeks of sharing books, students started asking if they could share 5 books on #5BookFriday. I made a schedule for the rest of the year and they would eagerly await their turn. Some weeks I didn't assign anyone the task so that I could share books with the class. I kind of missed sharing my favorites every week! 

The excitement that was built around this activity was amazing.  After 5 students were chosen to read the books, I would take a picture of the students with their "new reads" and post it on Twitter with 

#5BookFriday. 

So many new titles were shared, 

so many students received some great book recommendations for future reads, 

so many students thought about their "Top 5" books that they would share, 

so many students sat in anticipation of what books would be pulled out of the bag,

so many students would have to decide if they wanted to read that book or wait for maybe a better one to come out of the bag, 

so many students heard the excitement around these books and it helped them as readers, 

so many students wanted to share and be part of #5BookFriday,

so many more books were read because of #5BookFriday,

so....I deemed it a classroom success!  

How to do it...

1. Choose 5 books(sometimes I did 6 because I JUST couldn't decide...)

2. Put the books in a bag(easy)

3. Share out each book to your students(with lots of excitement)

4. Pick someone in the class to read each book(often the book has a line of students wanting it when they are done reading it)

5. Take a picture of the students with their books(students can do this as well)

6. Tweet a picture of the students with #5BookFriday

It's Monday, What Are You Reading?

If you are a blogger, you probably know about "It's Monday, What Are You Reading?" 

I used to participate in "IMWAYR" for some of my blog posts. I enjoyed reading the different blogs and seeing what others were reading both in the classroom and professionally. I decided this fall to start a classroom version of "IMWAYR" and this is what it looked like...

Pretty simple...they wrote it up on chart paper in the morning.

Over time, this started to evolve. I saw a post about doing this activity on Padlet in the classroom and I thought it was a brilliant idea! Since we are a 1-1 iPad classrom, we could easily do this using padlet. This was one of our first tries. 

Our 1st Padlet effort in December

It was a decent first effort, but with anything we have learned a lot and improved our posts. I started asking for more specifics and pushing for higher quality posts since anyone could view them on Twitter, in our newsletter, or on our blog! 

 Here is an example from the end of February...

2/23/15 Padlet

The students really enjoyed posting to Padlet each week and sharing their book. They also were able to get some great book recommendations from reading each other's posts. There were many times when they posted their first post and then I made them go back to revise their work and improve it. As a teacher, you can also go in and delete any extraneous posts or posts that do not represent the expectations of the classroom. 

We then got a little crazy at the end of the year and tried to go global! We would complete our Padlet and then send it out via Twitter around the world. We asked classrooms to add to the Padlet to share their reading. We were pretty excited to see other students from as far away as Canada adding to our Padlet. 

Global Padlet

We will definitely continue this next year and try to have others add to it as well in order to foster collaboration and connection across the country and even farther. This was an activity that we did in class that really added to our learning and helped to foster a love of reading and a strong culture of reading in our classroom!