It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

So many of my book recommendations have been from the weekly shares on teachmentortexts.com. Thank you to Jen and Kellee for hosting and thank you to all who contribute their reading lists! To see what others are reading, head on over to the website and link into all of the reading recommendations.

I have been reading professional books and blogs more than anything else since the start of school and I have two shout outs to give for important posts to me last week. One shout out goes to Sarah Broas at a littlebitofliteracy.blogspot.com. She wrote a powerful post (follow the link if you'd like to read the whole post) about why she believes so passionately about workshop teaching. She writes, "Reading and Writing workshop is a skeleton.  The teachers, the students, and the learning experiences breathe life into the structure to make it come alive. I value students. I value teachers.  I value relationships.  I value learning.  I believe the structure behind Reading and Writing Workshop fosters the joy of literacy and supports teachers and students through our life-long journeys."   The rest of her post is well worth your time to read.

Another post that has stayed with me was Stacy Shubitz's post about craft tables. Actually, she wrote a three part series and shared charts for several books. I loved the ideas her graduate students came up with for using Happy Like Soccer as a mentor text and I was inspired to begin my own craft tables for I'm Not by Pam Smallcomb, I Want My Hat Back by Jan Klassan, and Nothing To Do by Douglas Wood. I am using Stacy's tables as mentors and I think that they are a powerful way to help teachers use mentor texts in their classrooms.

Finally, I am working on a mentor interpretive essay for our new fifth grade unit and I am using Tomie dePaola's The Art Lesson as a text to reference. His character, Tommy, has some strong feelings about creativity and what it means to be an artist and his desire for self-expression shines through throughout this book. My essay will emphasize how sometimes our realities don't meet our expectations and we have to advocate for ourselves and our beliefs.

Happy reading to all of you!