First Chapter Friday is an easy, fun way to get students excited about reading the books in your library. Simply set aside time to read out loud – you guessed it – the first chapter of a popular book each Friday. This works best as part of an independent reading program, so you can simply pass the book off to one of the many interested readers you’ll have by the end. (Don’t have an independent reading program? This is a great place to start).
Book Ideas
The Crossover, by Kwame Alexander
I know you may already be speaking and reading aloud A LOT every day. Maybe your voice is exhausted. There are other ways to make first chapter Friday work than reading a chapter out loud for five periods in a row. If you’ve got a way to use a microphone and Garageband through some department or club at your school, you’ve got game-changing options. If you and two other members of your grade level team were to take the time to each record the first chapter of four books (do the voices!), you’d have months of material ready to access for all your classes. That’s a trade of about two hours of prep for sixty or so hours of workable audio. And if you did that every year, well…
In case you want to try this, here’s a lightning quick tech tutorial. Inside Garageband, start a new project. Choose “voice” from the opening menu. Then under “tracks” choose “new track” and select your plugged in microphone as the input. Then hit the red record button, lean into your mic, and record a little bit. Play it back to be sure it’s working. Click the recorded segment and delete it, then drag the line back to start again at the beginning. Record your whole first chapter. Then go up to “share” and choose “export song to disk.” This will allow you to save your audio track to your desktop. All this might feel weird at first, but there just might be a helpful someone at your school who can guide you the first time. If not, Youtube taught me, and it can teach you too!
While I LOVE listening to books and recommend it hither and yon, I often find it awkward playing audio to students (reading aloud for a long time is pretty much the same!). Granting them permission to put their heads down, stare into space while appearing to zone out, or doodle with no guidance, all feel like a bit of a classroom loss, somehow. Not exactly what I’d want an administrator stopping by to see, but also just not my own favorite sight.
A Way to Keep the Books Moving
There are always takers for First Chapter Fridays books right after you read them aloud. But in a week or two when the students bring them back, it’s nice for everyone to have ways of remembering which books have been featured. Letting students create “To Be Read” bookmarks or lists in their notebooks is one way to help, another is to feature your FCF books through posters on a dedicated bulletin board or with a book display across the top of a shelf.
Keeping these popular books in the spotlight will make your program more powerful, however you do it.
First Chapter Fridays are an easy way to build enthusiasm for your reading program. Even if you don’t have time to do anything but grab a book and read a chapter on the occasional Friday, I still think you should try this out. Everything else is icing on the cake; you can always work up to it over time as you build your program.
Want to help students focus as they listen to your First Chapter Friday readings? Sketchnotes can help! Grab my free pack of six fun templates here.
