Happy June!

Happy June to all teachers and students! You made it this far and are so close. We know/remember how incredibly exhausting this time of year can be between the heat, endless end of the school year events and requests, report cards, cleaning and packing up your classroom, and of course, the bittersweet farewells with your students.

If you still have some time with your students, our Pride Books 2022 post will give you some read aloud ideas for Pride this month. You can also work with your students on setting up for Summer Reading in a joyful and fun way (we hope).

We wrote about End of the School Year Activities in 2022 and in 2019 "What is always on your end of year list?" A quick 10 always on there items from us because we have so many and love traditions and making memories with our classes.

Lastly and maybe most importantly, don’t forget to think ahead about what YOU need this summer. Sending You Peace & Summer Wishes always, and if you have the free time and mental bandwidth, here are some Summer Professional Development Ideas.

Happy Pride and end of the school year. You did it!

Summer Reading

We wrote about some of the ways we set students up for summer reading a few years ago, and I still am not a fan of forced or assigned reading. There is research that reading logs actually reduce students’ motivation to read and negatively affect their attitudes toward reading. And honestly, they are just annoying! Imagine having to log how long you read and how many pages you read when you are reading before bed to relax. This applies to summer reading as well. Assigning a book or list of books students must read takes the joy out of reading. It’s much better to give them freedom and encouragement to find something they want to read and (hopefully) enjoy it!

This has been a long, hard year for teachers, so it’s also really important that you find your own summer reading that is rejuvenating! When everything feels out of my control, I find detective novels or mysteries help me escape into another world and provide a solution that I can try to figure out or guess, but am not at all responsible for. Your summer reading does not have to be books about teaching or really anything “productive.” Just find something that you’re excited to read.

That should be your assignment for your students as well. We try to give customized, thoughtful book recommendations and get students into series through recommendations, book clubs, read alouds, and more. We also try to provide opportunities for students to review or share their thoughts on books in ways that are fun and genuine. When we taught 5th grade, we used Goodreads for this and it was really great as well as being on the computer so students loved using it. You can read more about how we introduced Goodreads to our students here. However, for younger students, we give opportunities to share book reviews, recommend books to each other, and create “shelfies” (see cover photo)! We drew our shelfies using this linked template, but students could also take pictures of themselves with books they enjoyed over the summer and share them with their teachers in the fall. 

Some do’s and don’ts that I’ve learned over the years are: definitely encourage public library use, have students think about their own reading goals and routines for the summer, and model and promote excitement around books, book reviews and recommendations, and reading all year long. Remember that listening to audiobooks is another way to read and a lovely way for a family or group of people to enjoy a book together. Avoid telling students they need to read books at a certain level or a certain number of books. If parents ask about summer reading, tell them to help students to find books they enjoy and make reading part of their daily routine (for example, reading before bed or reading after dinner) as a family, whether that means listening to an audiobook, reading aloud, or reading independently.. Remember that librarians are magic and always have amazing, customized book recommendations. 

Happy almost summer!

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"What is always on your end of year list?" A quick 10 always on there items from us.

We were asked what is always on our end of year to do list.. Below are a few pieces we always have on that list. Ironically, for me the end of the year has so many of its own mini lists and rituals. 

A few things that are always on there for me are: 

1. Write thank you notes (this includes personal ones I write, and also putting aside class time and guiding the students to reflect and write their own. These include notes to students, ridiculously reliable, wonderful maintenance staff, an amazing receptionist, a family that has been really kind, a colleague/peer that helped you out, a class of students you used to have that is graduating etc..) 

2. Log that all our classroom books have been returned! Have students help out, remind families etc. 

3. Set aside class time to solicit student feedback. We wrote blog posts about how and why we do this in 2017 and 2018. End of year feedback from students (post from 2017), Always Ask for Student Feedback! (post from 2018). Our work of teaching and learning is grounded in reflection, this is so important! 

4. Take pictures / make a slideshow/ do some sort of comparison from beginning of the year end of the year. This can be photos from then and now, opening the letters we wrote to ourselves in September, or comparing work from the beginning of the year to the end of the year. 

5. Assign a lot of student helpers to take things down/ clean! 

6. Play more games/ plan for fun moments together, this is the last time this learning community will be together in exactly this way and time will fly and the year will be over. We love making a point to just enjoy each other as the year winds down. 

7. Prepare summer reading lists  (we also wrote a blog post on this, Setting Students Up for Summer Reading) --  foster continuous reading excitement (and let them enjoy giving you and one another recs!), and set them up for success to have books they know they want to get at the library or the bookstore. (We have tons of posts on books we love, here is the most recent one about books we extra loved for Asian Pacific American Heritage Month) 

8. Finish that all class read aloud! We wrote about how we wrap that up in an older post (Looking Back to Look Forward). 

9. Reflect- use that student feedback, consider the pieces that worked and haven't worked, and congratulate yourself. There is always more we could do or a piece that could have gone better or a student we wish we reached or supported better. Make note and also celebrate another great year of fostering forever learners! 

10. Plan an end of school meal that you're excited about (for me, it's usually an Ethiopian dish.. or sushi! I just got hungry writing that). We both just love food so.. yep! 

This piece was also published on Medium through McGraw Hill’s The Art of Teaching Project!

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We are now reading and reviewing ARC's !

We feel so hip, so cutting edge! It is no surprise to any of you who follow us here (or on Twitter) how much we love literature. We have seen on a daily basis how transformative it can be for us personally, but also for our students. As a result, we are now reading ARC's ( Advanced Reader's Copies) to continue our ongoing quest of excellent, thoughtful, diverse literature. If you are someone who is looking for a reader (or two! ) feel free to reach out to us! 

We have loved reading the ones we have received so far. We especially loved How to Love a Jamaican by Alexia Arthurs. The very first piece (Light Skinned Girls and Kelly Rowlands) in her short story collection blew our minds from the get go with its nuance, humanity, and the way it got at the depths of the many layers in our identities. Beautifully done-- we hope you can snag a copy this summer (It is officially out July 24th, 2018)! We would definitely use it with high schoolers!! 

What books are you loving this summer? What book are you desperate to get your hands on-- tell us, tell us! 

We're official! ;) 

Setting Students Up for Summer Reading

It’s so close to the end of the year (and summer!) that we have started getting questions about summer work and summer reading. We absolutely want to encourage students to read over the summer in order to maintain their good reading habits (which are important life skills) and avoid the dreaded summer slide. In our class (and at our school), we’ve found our students tend to have consistent access to books and reading options all summer, so for the population we work with, the most important way to encourage summer reading is to promote reading all year long!

All year, we have read alouds in our 3rd grade class. While we know this takes up a lot of instructional time, we have found that reading chapter books out loud to our 3rd graders has improved their comprehension, fluency, vocabulary, and engagement as readers (and more!). They have developed (or maintained) an incredibly high level of appreciation for wonderful books, reading, read alouds, authors, sequels, new vocabulary, cliffhangers, and more!

Apart from read alouds, we also encourage solid independent reading habits. We gave up on reading logs early this year as they felt like a drag and a chore and instead added a section on homework grids (they receive a new one every week with homework choices that are due Friday) that says, “What is one book you enjoyed this week?” Some students write as many as three or four books they enjoyed that week, and some add comments about the books too! We also have students share out periodically about books they are enjoying and encourage them to recommend books to each other. This genuine sharing of books and authentic pleasure in reading is gold.

Another amazing tool to prep students to be readers all summer long (and beyond) are book clubs! We are just wrapping up a book clubs unit that has been so powerful. Again, talking to each other about books you enjoy is a life skill and a genuine, authentic way to communicate about books. We also tried to tap into books that were the first in a series so some of our more reluctant readers would be really into the first book because they read it with their book club, and now have many more books with the same beloved characters to read all summer.

Finally, (and we can’t emphasize this enough), encourage library use! We are so lucky to be in DC where we have an amazing public library system that runs a phenomenal summer reading program for kids. However, just reminding students that libraries exist is important. For all of our research projects this year, we’ve brought in books from the DC public library (and reminded our students to take extra good care of them since they are “our personal library books.”) Modeling library use (and of course, active reading as adults/teachers) can motivate students to use the public library themselves (and of course, provide them with books all summer). Librarians are our priceless and valuable partners in our quest to get kids reading. If your students may not have consistent access to books this summer, ask a librarian for help! Depending on your flexibility with taking students out of the building or inviting people in as guest speakers, there are multiple ways to set students up to be public library users.

A student's summer reading goals: "read as many books as possible!"

We don’t assign a list of required reading over the summer (and are fortunate to have this flexibility at our school), but we do have students set summer reading goals and create lists of books they might like to read over the summer (and we share our own). This “Summer Reading Bingo” from the Curriculum Corner looks fun. How does summer reading work in your classroom (or school or household)?  We’d love to hear more ideas!

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