To promote a life-long love of reading, there are many interactive bulletin boards that students can use at various times throughout the day. These bulletin boards are sometimes a full class lesson, an extension task on our gumball machine, and an integral part of our reading workshop. This also helps to keep students accountable for all of their reading in the classroom. Some of the boards are listed below.
Books We've Read Together
To constantly reinforce the definitions of the various genres of books, we classify each book we read together as a class and stick it in the appropriate spot on our board. Students then explore these genres independently during Reader's Workshop. This is monitored by their Genre Keys. (below)
Unlock the Door to the World of Reading: Genre Keys To encourage the students to read various genres during reader's workshop I have created key rings for each of them. Each ring has 3-6 keys on them. Each key is color coded by genre. This is a great way for me to monitor which genres the students feel most comfortable with. Every time they empty their key ring completely, they get a ticket from me!
Be a Word Catcher The students are encouraged to collect words they love. When they hear or see a word they like, we collect them into our Word Jar. I write the word on an index card and the students decorate the card with glitter glue. After we hang the words in the jar, the students are given a ticket each time they use one in their writing or in a sentence.
Reader's Choice On this bulletin board, students will vote on whether or not they would recommend various books to others. As an extension, they can write a critique of our class book or the book they are reading by writing a book review for The Spucci Times. They are also invited to recommend the next book to be evaluated by the class.
StarBooks Book Awards The students will nominate books each month for the StarBooks Book Awards. The criteria will change each month, and students can nominate any book they have read in our classroom or at home. The class should try to read as many of the nominated books as possible so they can make an educated decision when voting. The winners are hung on our bulletin board for the next month, and the book is awarded a seal to forever identify it as a winner. For more information, click here.
Student Book Recommendations Students are welcome to recommend books to each other on this bulletin board. This gives them the opportunity to use some of these "juicy" words when describing their recommendations.
Reading Takes Us Places As students continue their reading, they will often be taken to many different places. Each time they encounter the name of a state or a town in their reading, we will mark its location on our United States or world map.
The D.E.A.R. Diaries This interactive bulletin board that holds students accountable for their independent reading of both fiction and non-fiction books, articles and poems. These extension tasks serve to increase students' higher level thinking as well as to deepen their comprehension of texts we read in class together, during guided reading and during independent DEAR time. The students are asked to pick one of four cards that have different questions on each of them. Each question is focused on a different comprehension skill such as identifying main idea, sequencing and summarizing events, drawing conclusions, and identifying author's purpose. This bulletin board can also be condensed by putting these pockets on the back cover of students' reading response notebooks, as shown below.
Ms. Spucci's Class Smithtown Central School District
