Wanting to grow and foster a love of reading in your students can feel like a daunting task.
What do you do to help your kiddos who hate even picking up a book?
How can you help develop your students into lifelong readers without adding more and more to your schedule?
While this task is difficult, here are five tips you can EASILY add to help create a classroom culture that loves reading, regardless of your reading curriculum.
Variety of Books 📚
While this may not feel groundbreaking, it is always a good place to start.
Go through your classroom library and make sure you have a wide variety of books for your students to choose from.
✨ Some graphic novel choices
✨ Different reading levels
✨ A variety of topics, characters, and genres
Don’t just stop there.
Then, spend some time helping your students explore different genres, topics, or themes found in books.
Help your students find their sweet spot.
First Chapter Fridays 🌟
This is a super fun tradition held by some teachers and a GREAT way to expose your students to a wide variety of books.
During your read aloud time on Friday (or another part of your day), grab a couple of different books. Then, read ONLY the first chapter of each book.
This helps hook some of your students into the storyline and allows you to share LOTS of books with your students over the year.
Adding this short routine is a fun way to help foster a love of reading in your students.
Choose the First Book in a Series 📖
The books you read aloud to your class are powerful.
They are often the stories your students will look back on fondly and want to read over and over again.
Reading the first book in a series together is a great way to encourage students to pick up the second book on their own.
Provide Students a Chance to Share 💬
Chances are, you will have one to two students in your classroom who LOVE reading. And they are excited to talk about books they have enjoyed.
So, why not provide a way for your students to talk about their books with each other? This doesn’t have to be anything fancy or formal.
But, providing space for your students to share book ideas with each other can be pretty powerful, even for reluctant readers.
Here are some ways you could make space for this in your classroom:
➡️ Use book display stands for students to prop up books they love.
➡️ Have students write about their favorite books on index cards and place them on or around the books on your bookshelf.
➡️ Bring students up in front of the class to do a book talk. A book talk is a short way to share what a story is mainly about and who might like reading it.
Spend Time Reading Yourself ✨
Our students are smart. They pick up on if we truly believe the things we teach them.
When we tell them reading is important, but they don’t see us spending any time reading, they might wonder if it’s really true.
The easiest way to help foster a love of reading in your students is to simply schedule some time during your day when you also sit and read.
Elementary classrooms often have an independent reading time. What would happen if you took the first 15 minutes of that to do it as well?
If developing a love of reading in your students is something you want to dig into more, I highly recommend checking out the book The Book Whisperer by Donalyn Miller.
This book is filled with practical ideas on how to help your students see reading as the beautiful thing it is. And, it might even challenge the things you thought about reading and teaching reading in general.
⭐ If you aren’t sure where to start, check out my blog posts below with lists of different read alouds! These books are great places to help launch your class on its adventure of falling in love with reading!