Thing 20: Social Reading & Book Stuff

-
Image result for social reading - children
SOCIAL READING AND BOOK STUFF

The Concept of Social Reading originally brought to mind reading for pleasure. As I learned more I realized that especially on the elementary level this was a concept that I had never explored. Everything I tried to develop became too structured and reflected pair share reading. This was too much like school work. Then I tried s digital book club but it was still too teacher led and not a social setting.

So then with my 3rd and 4th graders I provided a venue in both lab and library who just wanted to talk about books they liked to meet. At first they just met and it was total chaos but as they started to listen to each other they decided they really wanted to share and read books. They realized that they had interests in things that they had never even thought of. They suggested books for future book orders and  explored places they could read them online for the time being.

The amount of teachable moments that developed out of the opportunity to be a social reader amazed me. It is not for every student but the students it spoke to made me realize that if they continue this practice into the future- they will lifelong readers and beyond.

Some of the resources we used were: Tiny Cat, Book Reviews within OPALS, Epic, Good Reads, Google classroom, Youtube Read Alouds, FlipGrid, and we shared a few Kindles, Audiobooks, and print copies of books in Google docs that students could each highlight and comment on in collaborative manner.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Thing 1: Blogging

-
Image
Hi my name is Lynne Ronan. I currently am employed as a teacher assistant at Brasher Falls Central School in Brasher Falls NY. I am responsible for our elementary library and our elementary computer lab. Our school runs on a six day cycle and every other day I am either in the library or the lab. I am responsible for whole class- to class and a half instruction grades K-4. My motivation in education began with my parents and numerous extended family all working in the education field. I then returned to my hometown with my children and they attended the same school I attended and my parents taught at. I also have the honor of working at my alma mater. My new motivation is my beautiful granddaughter (above with her mom) and where the future of education needs to go for our future generations. We are in the process of updating our curriculum in both the library and the lab. Our goal is to have the library embedded with maker space experiences and to provide a computer lab that ha
Read more

Thing 3: Twitter and Other Online Communities

-
Image
OK, so I have to be honest I thought this thing experience was going to be one of the easiest. I also thought I was quite sure that I would not even consider joining Twitter for various reasons that I will not get involved in sharing at this time. As you can see from my PLN above- as I explored Twitter I did find it to be a very valuable tool. I found many other educators to follow. I found organizations that I am involved in to follow. I actually felt a similar experience exploring Twitter that I had when I first discovered Pinterest many years ago. I can see that if I did not keep myself focused I could spend hours exploring and discovering. I will commit to exploring daily but will also do this with mindfulness and purpose. I believe having a PLN will help keep me focused. I will definitely use Twitter as a resource of information and resources professionally. I did take some time to reach out to a few people I know on Twitter. I was surprised to see so many people on Twit
Read more

Thing 5 : Presentation Tools

-
Image
                                                      photo from openclipart I have used the traditional PowerPoint often over the years. I also use Google slides on a regular basis. Although both of these forums are easy to use and very powerful tools I really enjoyed exploring new forums..  Buncee brought new life to an old presentation that I use with my students annually. Buncee was fun. Also, having the backgrounds and items (clip art)  built in made the experience timely and entertaining. I also really enjoyed Tellegami and HaikuDeck. Each of these sites are sites that I could see my students enjoying both as the participant and the creator.  Below is a presentation I use for students who are struggling remembering what they have read. It is an introduction to a problem solving challenge that my students participate in. They are assigned the presentation in their google classroom and then they are invited to brainstorm on a shared google doc. The questions po
Read more