Fabulous Luther 4th!: Celebrating Reading!

Since the beginning of the school year the Fabulous Luther 4th graders in my room have busy building their understanding of a library and how books are organized. Our Luther library, as well as our classroom library are key elements to our Comprehensive Literacy Model because they hold the thousands of books that we want our students to enjoy and learn from.

Our students need to understand how our libraries work and where different genres of literature are located so they make appropriate book choices that enhance their learning.

In class we have worked very hard identifying what the different colored bins in our classroom library stand for, what genre (types) of books are found in the bins in our library, and what different book labels stand for. Students took each and every bin off the bookshelves, went through them, organized and reorganized them, and relabeled then. Their hard work gave them ownership over the library and made it theirs! They now know what books can be found there and are excited to begin "checking out" titles they are interested in. It is important that a library is USEFUL to students otherwise they do not take advantage of all their is too READ in a library!

Finally we spent time building anchor charts that will help support our understanding of how we best choose books so they are JUST RIGHT for us ~ not too easy...not too hard throughout the school year.

Today we celebrated our library work with an end of day "Library Celebration!" We had cake and talked about all the learning we have built so far.

Now our focus will shift from library learning to ourselves as a reader. We will focus on our thinking as readers and what that looks and sounds like. We will also focus on how we will demonstrate our thinking as readers. We also will begin our first genre focus in reading ~ Nonfiction Text - Informational and Everyday Text and well as our first strategy focus ~ Making Inferences in Texts.