We want to give your class books!
By Amanda Schwartz
Read Aloud West Virginia is offering a new way for teachers to put books in their students’ hands: a Virtual Book Tasting.
We’re calling it a “book tasting” because like a cake tasting, you get little samples of a bunch of options. Then students can make informed choices of books they get to keep.
Students also get opportunities to have meaningful conversations about what they read. They can recommend books to friends or warn them off. They can practice the habits of lifelong readers and learners – to read by choice and to discuss readings with colleagues.
“The research base on student-selected reading is robust and conclusive,” literacy experts Richard Allington and Rachel Gabriel wrote in the 2012 article “Every Child, Every Day”. “Students read more, understand more, and are more likely to continue reading when they have the opportunity to choose what they read.”
Researchers also agree that giving students time to discuss books with peers is essential. According to the same Allington and Gabriel article, reading outcomes were better “when kids simply talked with a peer about what they read than when they spent the same amount of class time highlighting important information after reading.”
Our book tastings emphasize choice and create opportunities for students to chime in with opinions and questions. They even include a conversation starter “The Worst Book Ever,” in which a volunteer presents a popular book they don’t recommend, and participants are prompted to respond with their own opinions. This activity is intentionally designed to demonstrate to students that readers don’t love every book they crack open, and that it’s OK to quit a book they don’t enjoy and try something else. It is designed to welcome students who have not already discovered pleasure in reading, as well as avid readers.
After the book tasting, students will have an opportunity to choose a book from those discussed. We’ll pack the selected titles, tag them for each student, and arrange to deliver them to the school for distribution.
All schools enrolled with Read Aloud qualify for free book tastings and other book distributions, and because of pandemic pressures on school staff, all schools enrolled in the 2019-20 school year have been automatically re-enrolled with us for 2020-21, unless schools have notified us otherwise.
Click here to fill out an application to request books for your students. We look forward to hearing from you!