The Best Book to Read
This book is a wonderful read for so many reasons. It’s a great way to introduce students to the classroom library, the school’s library, your neighborhood library or even just to get them excited about reading. It let’s the kids know that there is a book about every topic they can imagine and there is a ‘best book’ for them. If you are looking to teach about the different genres of books, it’s also a wonderful read for that.
I like reading this book in September, before introducing our classroom library. I like to show kids a new book, a used book in good condition, and one with ripped pages that’s been scribbled on. We discuss which book we would like to read and why. Then we talk about how to treat our books.
After reading The Best Book to Read, I call kids in small groups to help them find a book they would like to read. This is a great way to introduce the set-up of your classroom library. I have my books organized by levels, to support guided reading and in topics. This way kids can find books about topics they are excited to read.
After everyone has their books, we get together on the carpet and discuss the experience. How easy or difficult it was to find the book they wanted to read. This discussion is to help them realize if we keep our library organized, we can find the books we want with ease. This is when I will point out ways to maintain this organization. For example, you can put matching stickers on all the dinosaur books and the container they go in. This way, all the kids have to do is to match the stickers when cleaning up.
To make this easy you can get colored dot stickers and make them color coded. This is the quickest and most affordable way to do it. If you have the extra time, the budget, and the desire to make it cute, there are a lot of downloadable products on TPT (teacherspayteachers.com) that you could laminate, cut out and post on your bins.
If you’d like additional activities that go along with this book, you can download the lesson plan, aligned with common core state standards, here.
Happy Teaching!
