What I'm Reading & Teaching in September

I have mixed feelings about the end of summer and the start of the school year. On one hand, I had a pretty darn good summer and I'm sad to see it go. On the other hand, I really do love my job and I'm eager to spend a year with a new group of learners, reading and writing and growing together. I work at a small, unique school and I'm also excited about the positive directions we continue to move in.

What I'm Reading

My reading really slowed down in August. Between two weeks at the beach with my daughters and a week of professional development, there just wasn't a lot of downtime for reading. I'm looking forward to restarting my independent reading routine in my classroom to add some reading time back into my day. What I've also learned in the year and a half or so of tracking my reading is that I read more when I'm drained from school and don't have the physical or mental capacity to do anything else at night. During the summer when I'm recharged, I'm more likely to spend that time doing other things.

Here's what I'm hoping to read in September (you'll notice a few carrying over from August's list):

1. Finding Junie Kim by Ellen Oh (middle grade fiction)

2. The Prettiest by Brigit Young (middle grade fiction)

3. Becoming Kareem: Growing Up On and Off the Court by Kareem Abdul Jabbar (middle grade nonfiction)

4. Dogs of the Deadlands by Anthony McGowan (middle grade fiction)

5. Two Degrees by Alan Gratz (middle grade fiction)

6. The Basketball Game by Hart Snider (middle grade graphic novel)

7. Accomplished by Amanda Quain (young adult fiction)

8. Beating Heart Baby by Lio Min (young adult fiction)

What I'm Teaching

The first week of school is spent community building and establishing routines in my classroom. Many of my activities come from my back to school stations, but I also do a genre sort, some book dating, and this year I added a genre circles activity. I made a sheet to represent each of the 10 genres in my classroom library and students added their names in the "love it," "like it," or "don't like it/haven't read much" circle. 

This week we also started our "Where I'm From" writing pieces by reviewing basic grammar: nouns, verbs, and adjectives as well as sensory details. This year in addition to examining the original poem by George Ella Lyons, students will also look at examples from Kwame Alexander and Renee Watson before brainstorming to write their own. After students have written their own poems, I'll pull a line from each to create a class poem. My goal is always to record it to play for parents at back to school night.

Depending on our pacing with our "Where I'm From" poems, I'll next move into reviewing simple sentences with students (subject and predicate) and we might get into writing two word sentence pieces. I found two great mentor texts for that last year. I'd also like to work in more quick writes as the start of the year. I did a better job with that once we started our novel unit last year.

My first unit of the year: Animal Intelligence will begin week two of school. I start with a short story, "The Mixer" by P. G. Wodehouse. It's a challenge for students at the start because of the British humor, but once they begin to understand irony and how the narrator influences the reader's understanding of events, they love it. My favorite activity we do after reading is a question trail activity (read more about them here) and this year, I'll be adding in more vocabulary review and games. Vocabulary is one of my weak areas and really key to increasing students' reading abilities. Although students enjoy this story, I am on the lookout to replace it with something more current as we may be doing away with our Collections anthologies in the near future. Send any suggestions my way!

To contrast the fiction piece, students then dive into a series of nonfiction pieces about animal intelligence. "Animal Snoops: The Wondrous World of Wildlife Spies" highlights different ways that animals communicate with and spy on each other for survival and mating purposes. "Can Animals Feel and Think?" introduces the idea the animals not only display emotions, but are also capable of logical thought including problem solving. Finally, "How Smart Are Animals?" explores the difficulties in measuring animal intelligence. Throughout these nonfiction pieces, we'll do some work with text dependent analysis writing and summarizing. We'll also do our first mini presentation and create mind maps as a way of taking notes.