So how can we go about incorporating trade books, fiction, nonfiction, all of these different types of reading material into our classes in a way that’s going to encourage students to get interested, to get them learning, and to just get books in their hands to help them in their educational journey?

Read Aloud

The first one is, I think, one of my absolute favorites. This is my main go to, and that is read aloud. I’m not even talking about the second one yet. I’m just talking about finding good books to read to your students. There’s a number of advantages to this. One of them is that it’s a wonderful way of motivating students who might find reading a little bit difficult to realize once again, afresh, what interesting stories there are out there if you put the effort in to figure out and to build that skill.

I have a collection of books that I just keep on a little shelf in my classroom that have been, in some cases, my go tos from a number of years. Some of the books that I read today (and I think I’m going on 13 years now) have been books that I started reading the very first time that I was in my classroom. Some of them are books that I remember my teachers reading to me. One of them is actually a book that I got as a gift from my teacher when I was in first grade. It was a chapter book. As someone who loved to read, I remember she gave me a chapter book to read instead of a book that one might typically read in first grade. And now I use it today to teach my fifth graders the love of  reading, and they just devour it. In fact, they ask me if there’s a sequel to the book, and I have to tell them,  “I’m sorry, there’s not a sequel, but here’s the author. Hey, we should go to the library and find books by the same author.” And it’s amazing to see elementary school students starting to find favorite authors that they’re looking for.  And I find that read alouds can be a great way to expose them to different authors, different types of reading that they might not have tried otherwise.

I like to go all out and read alouds. It may just be my personality, but I get fairly comfortable giving different voices to my characters, giving them different accents, which I’m not going to demonstrate right now. Sorry. And just going all out with them. And I find that students enjoy it so much more that way. I don’t think it’s a necessary thing that you have to but might not be a bad thing to try out sometime and see how your students respond. I probably could say a lot more about read aloud. We might come back to that here a little bit later.

Literature Circles & Book Clubs

Literature circles and book clubs are another strategy that I find is a wonderful way to get students interested. One of the handouts that you would have received on your way in was a collection. It was the packet. It’s the packet of papers. I might take a few moments just to draw your attention to what that is about. This is something that I authored a few years ago. I pulled from a number of sources, so I’m not going to claim full authorship on this. But I wanted to try to find a way to get my students interested in books, exposed to some new novels that they wouldn’t have picked otherwise, and just to get them reading and engaged with books other than the textbooks that we were using in class.

That year that I did this, I was going to work a little bit faster than I might have normally in my   actual reading textbook that we use to give myself a little bit of daylight in the school year.  I thought, I want to build some time into the year so that we can take some time to read some other books. And so, I looked around, and I found some book sets of about four to five books each, (same title). And I gave my students an option. I said, “Here are the books. ” I let them sit out for a couple days so that if they wanted to, they could come up and they could leaf through them before they committed to something.

And then I gave them a survey. And I said, “Al right, on a scale of one to five, go ahead and rate these. One being the book you want to read the most, five being the one I’d rather read all the other ones before I got to that one.”  I think it’s how I worded it. And so, they took that survey. I took those surveys and tabulated everything and came up with a list of… And it was interesting to see how it worked out. I was not expecting some of the choices that the students made. If I had picked the book to give to the students that I thought would have been the best match, I would have been wrong about half the time, which was eye opening in itself, but anyway.

 They were able to choose the book. They got their books, and then I taught them how to budget your time. And that is what the first page is. It says, “Develop a Reading  Plan.” What they do is meet with their groups, and so I organize them in books. All right, you four are going to be reading  “Little House on the Prairie.” And you four over here are going to be reading this book. And you over here are going to be reading this book. What I want you to do is to find what are the pages that you need to read. Do you count the title page? Do you count the copyright info in the front? No. Figure out how many pages of text are there. And we’re going to do this over two school weeks. And so, I’d like you to find out about how many pages you have to read every day. And so they work together, and they find out I have to read 15 and 1/2 or 16 and 3/4  pages or whatever a day.

And then we have a discussion.  “Okay, so where’s that at in here? Let’s take this book and look. So, 16 and 3/4 of a page. That means you’re going to stop right about here. Right. Who in here would find it easy to stop there?” And no one’s ever… It’s like, “I can’t stop there.” So, what do we do? And so, then they learn how to deal with text. We’re looking.  “Okay, well, is this close to a chapter break?” Because “Could we actually maybe read an extra page today to finish this chapter and then start fresh the next day on chapter four or whatever it might be?”

And so they get practice in budgeting their time, planning out ahead so that they can take this book that might look big and daunting. And I find that this has a way of actually breaking it down into these small little incremental pieces that all of a sudden don’t look so big anymore.  “Oh, I can actually read this book by just reading 12 pages a day.” For some students, that feels like a big relief. We might look at this big book. I always have students who want to read “Swiss Family Robinson,” if you’re familiar with that book. That’s one of my options. It’s about this thick. And they look at it, and I can tell, especially by the second time we do this in the school year, the first time, they’re completely repelled by that thing.  “This looks too big.”  And the next time I sit the books out, they might actually start over here, picking it up and looking through it and spend a little bit of time and then might put it back down again.

Recently I started doing a third round of book clubs where they get to read their third choice. And it’s amazing to see how many of them are like, “I’m going to go for the big one.” And what I find is, not only are they ready now for the big one. It doesn’t look as scary anymore. But by this time of actually spending time reading, I moved past this. They’re actually feeling better about themselves as readers and have this feeling like, “You know, I think I can do this.”  And they do. And it’s amazing. To me that’s breaking down one of those, or not just one. That’s several barriers that can keep students away from just reading in general. Using trade books to help build reading habits in our students. That’s literature circles.

Book clubs are something that’s very similar. Both are, I think, really great opportunities to get students talking about books together in class. Trade books a few other ways. And these are specifically with fiction. Stories that are created from the imagination, not presented as fact, though they may be based on true stories.

Infuse into the Curriculum

Infuse into the curriculum. This has been another one of my just absolute favorite ways of getting trade books, books that are stories that we might read for pleasure on the side, and actually just putting them directly into the curriculum.

This can require some discernment.  “Where is a good place to do this?” There are probably some places that it’s not wise. We probably should stick pretty close to the textbook in this case. But I find that social studies, history, geography, science, some of these subjects work really, really well. To look at the material in the book, the teacher’s Guide, and think, “Do I know any really great books that I could either add to this?” I could either just put on the tray in front and mention to my students, “Hey, if you’re interested in this topic, or if you’d like to learn more, I have some books up here. You’re more than welcome to borrow them and put them back for someone else to read.” That’s another way to infuse them directly in.

But what I like to do the most just personally, is to just substitute. Pull out and put something else in.

One of the things that I’ve done with this that’s been my personal favorite … I teach an Ephrata, Pennsylvania, Lancaster County, and for many years, I taught my students 5th grade level American Revolution. And we had used a secular textbook at the time, and I wasn’t all that impressed with the perspective and the viewpoint, the worldview that was in the book. And so, I was trying to think, how can I give a perspective to my students that’s based more on a worldview of faith? How can I incorporate the values that we want them to become familiar with and to adopt as their own into this? And so, I went to the library. And I was looking through and I came across a book by Romaine Stauffer  (many of you may have read it before) called “Hidden Riches.” If you have not read it yet, you need to read it. It is an excellent book. She did a tremendous amount of historical research from the local area there in Lancaster County and used actual people’s names and weaved the story of how things played out in the days leading up to the American Revolution. I believe fairly close to fact. And one of the really exciting things that I experienced in that is that the characters in the book were actually my students’ ancestors.

By the time we were finished reading the book and learning about the American Revolution, I had one student, she brought in this huge binder one day, like, “Mr. Brode, look at this!” And she dropped it on my desk.  “It’s my family tree!”

I’m like, “Really? Oh, wow, that looks interesting. I love family trees.”

She’s like, “But look at this!” And she started flipping through, and there were the characters’ names that we were learning about, the actual things that they had done and stood up to the pressures of the time to participate in this militaristic spirit.  And I’m just still feeling really just like blessed by that. Like, to me that was just an amazing experience. And that actually continued past that. I have never seen 10- and 11-year-olds so excited and thankful for a heritage that they had.

So, there were so many other things that came from incorporating a trade book in every other year.  When I get to studying this again, I have no doubt what I’m going to do. We’re going to do the same thing. And so, I’ve used that book for a number of years.

She actually wrote the sequel to it, which is called “Loyalty Test,” which digs further. And it is the next stage actually during the war. And I’ve now used that as a two-part series. I’ve developed a reading guide for both of them that students are reading, and we’re discussing things based directly off of the text. And that is now my American Revolution unit. We just put the textbooks aside for a couple weeks, and we just enjoy some good books. And that to me is one of my favorite ways to infuse books directly into the curriculum. Sometimes it requires us to think a little bit outside of the box for how it can actually be done.

Reading Challenges and Competitions

Reading challenges and competitions. This is one I’ve been able to get up off of the ground. This was something that I was familiar with growing up. I shared a little bit about it at the beginning. It was a part of my elementary school experience where we had a book list that was published. Generally, I pictured teachers getting together and thinking, “What are some really great books we want to get in the hands of our students?” And they would come up with a list of, like, 40 books. And then they would make sure there was access to those books in the school library. Some teachers would have them in their classroom libraries. In some cases, they were books that students had at home as well. And we had several months to just read.  “Here are the books. Here’s going to be your team of five people. Decide how you’re going to divide these out and read so you can become familiar with them.”

And then we had a fun day, sometime late February, early March, right around, like, February fun days’ time. And we had our little teens. We would come together, and the teacher might just give a little statement or a fact of something that came from one of the books. And we had a little buzzer. I forget exactly how it all worked. And essentially, if you knew the answer, you said the answer and you got a point. And they didn’t last long. It was like 10, 15 minutes. And we developed this little, tiny tournament. And it was just a really great way to enjoy some time together. But the most valuable part was all of the reading that went into it ahead of time. So those are reading challenges, competitions.

Book Talks

Book talks, I also find, can be really helpful. It’s one thing to look at the spine of a book on a shelf. It’s something completely different to have that book off of the shelf and in front of you. I’m not about to actually do a book talk with this book, but to introduce a book to students, especially one that you think there’s a collection of students in your room who might enjoy that book, who would not otherwise find it, and just giving them just enough to spark their curiosity. It’s fascinating then to watch after you say something like, I’m going to leave this book up here on the tray, and if anybody wants to come pick it up at some point today, go ahead and do that. Usually by the time I’ve turned around to walk back to my podium, it’s already gone. Like, that’s pretty much my experience every time.

time.  And then sometimes I actually have to deal with, “Mr. Brode,  they’ve had that book for a whole week. When are they going to be done with it?”

“I don’t know. You can go ask them, find out what page they’re on, and figure out.”

Then I just watch. It will just swirl around the room for the rest of the school year.

Another thing that I like to do is to tell students what I’m reading as a way of accomplishing several objectives. One, to let you know, “Hey, your teacher actually not only says that books are important, but I actually try to live that out, too. And I read, too, for fun. And so, here’s what I’m reading.”  And so I’ll try to keep a little somewhere in the room, maybe a little poster on a bulletin board somewhere that I can dry erase off and just write the title of what I’m reading. And it also can generate some interesting questions. They might have some questions to ask, like,  “Hey, what are you… What is that about?” And it is just a really great relationship builder.