Back-to-School season is the perfect time to set up your reading program for success throughout the year.
Heading into the school year with a well-organized library, a plan for routines like First Chapter Friday and Book Trailer Tuesday, a kickoff book tasting, an appealing book display, and a regular time to read will help so much in inspiring your students to read for joy throughout the year, and hopefully for the rest of their lives.
Lately I’ve been thinking about a well-run reading program like a reading escalator.
You want to have the books and book P.R. that will help students step on and just naturally rise through the steps. So today on the podcast, let’s talk about HOW.
Build Digital Independent Reading Library Shelves
If you’re thinking that this all sounds great, but your library only has about a dozen books at this point, let’s start by building some digital library shelves and getting your students E-access.
Whether it’s through your school library or your local library, back-to-school season is a wonderful time to work with your librarian to help every student get a free Libby or Overdrive account so they can read ebooks and listen to audiobooks for free. This can make a huge impact in expanding their access to titles and also giving them a way to read right from their phone in situations where they’ve got time to read but no book.
You can tour your student through the reading app they’ll be using and show them how to request books, but I also suggest you build a few digital bookshelves for them so they’re not starting from scratch when they try to figure out what to check out. Dropping screenshots of your top recommended books onto digital images of bookshelves inside Google Slides is easy, fun, and, dare-I-say, a bit addictive once you get started. It’s kind of like having a million dollar budget for your classroom library! Then you simply link each book to its page in the digital library program your students have access to (probably Libby or Overdrive) so they can click the book and then go read the description and add it to their shelf or get in line for it.
You can dive deeper into exactly how to make your digital shelves in this post, The Step-by-Step guide to Creating Digital Bookshelves.
Once your digital shelves are complete, be sure to print a QR code poster linking to them to hang by your library, to remind students where to go for help picking out books for their digital devices.
Organize your Independent Reading Library and Set up a Display
While I grew up grabbing books by author in an alphabetical setup at the library, I’m now firmly in the genre camp for classroom libraries. Since most students who arrive in your classroom will NOT already be voracious readers, giving them easy-to-access genre sections can really help them find the types of books they’ll enjoy.
Of course you’ll also want to set up some kind of system for checkout. This can be as simple as a notebook where they sign out their book with their name, the date, and the title, or as complicated as an app like book Buddy. Same goes for your return system, which can be a rolling cart, a crate, or maybe an empty shelf with a sign on it. The main thing is to have a plan!
Finally, start the year with a fun book display across your windowsill or the top of your bookshelf in your library area. You can go with a theme, showcase a genre, or just pick out your absolute top hits to help inspire readers.
You can find all my genre labels, reading display headers, and other favorite program elements in my complete choice reading program on TPT here if you’re looking for a quick option, or, or course, create your own.
Roll out First Chapter Friday and/or Book Trailer Tuesday
In the first week of school as you begin to build connections with your students and set up your classroom norms, consider getting started immediately with a First Chapter Friday and a Book Trailer Tuesday featuring books you have in your classroom.
If you’re new to the concepts, let me explain them in brief – but feel free to follow the links above to dive deep!
For a First Chapter Friday, you pull a great book off the shelf and read the beginning (or some compelling part in the book) aloud to your students, giving them a sketchnotes template to jot down their takeaways. Then, having amped up interest in the book, you make it available to check out.
For a Book Trailer Tuesday (or any day), you simple hit “play” on a two minute book trailer online showcasing a book you have available in your library. It’s like a book talk with visuals.
Maybe as school opens you want to feature books where students are new to a school or beginning to build friendships. Jerry Craft’s graphic novel New Kid comes to mind for a book trailer, or for First Chapter Friday, Matt de la Peña’s contribution to the short story collection Flying Lessons. It’s a story about how a boy spends the summer before school at a highly competitive basketball court and then writes about it for his English teacher (hear him read it out loud for your students and grab the free sketchnotes sheet to go with it right here).
Host a Book Tasting
Whether it’s in the first week or a bit later on, a book tasting is an easy way to help your students see what’s available in your library and find their first read (as well as titles for their continuing TBR lists). A book tasting would fit well on the day you’re going to let students read on their own in class for the first time, or the day you’re going to roll out the fact that students will be reading throughout the term and eventually sharing back somehow with gentle accountability like a book pitch, book trailer, or book review podcast that can help contribute to the culture of reading in the class.
If you’re new to book tastings, check out this post for more details, and this fun interview with Abby Gross for ideas on how to take them digital.
Book Talk your Favorite Independent Reading Titles
As your students begin to get to know YOU better throughout the first first week, it’s a nice time to introduce yourself as a reader as well and share your favorite books. You might step over to your library and book talk just one book that week, or even one book a day. It will help your students learn more about you at the same time they learn more about your library.
If you’re new to book talks, don’t worry, it doesn’t have to be a polished presentation.
Just pick up a book, show students the cover, and tell them a little about the plot and style, why you liked it, and what books you might compare it to – for example, “This book is like Harry Potter meets The Adams Family” or “This book is for Percy Jackson fantasy fans who’ve already read every single Rick Riordan book and are ready for something new. Plus, did you know it’s by the author of The Hunger Games?!”
Introduce a Basic Reading Assignment
Sometime in the first or second week, you can explain your reading program structure. I suggest building in some kind of gentle accountability that will help students to read and share at least one book with their classmates each term. The goal is for them to share back in a way that helps build the reading culture in the classroom without ruining reading for them. It’s NOT a book report.
Maybe you’ll invite everyone to create book trailer videos for their favorite books that you can share on future Book Trailer Tuesdays.
Maybe you’ll host a Literary Food Truck Festival.
Maybe you’ll create a student book talk podcast together with everyone contributing a sixty second episode.
These gentle check-ins/culture boosters don’t mean kids can only read one book in the term, it just means that there is a baseline expectation that everyone will find and read at least one book as part of the program. This is an area to tread carefully. You don’t want to make this all about the assignment, because it’s really all about the reading.
Got Extra Time? Bookface is a Blast.
If you want a reading-based icebreaker in the first week, #Bookface is a fun option. Let’s call it a bonus idea for today – you definitely don’t NEED to do it, but it would be fun! If you’d like to try it, see if you can coordinate with your librarian for a short tour and a chance for your librarian to say hello and share how they can assist students throughout the year. Then you and your librarian partner can invite students (in pairs) to search out a book with a person on the cover and create their own fun #bookface posters you can then display in your classroom (and/or school library) as part of your reading program.
If you’re new to the idea of #bookface and you’d like to see the step by step instructions, check out this post.
