3 Purposeful Beginning of the Year Reading Activities
3 Purposeful Beginning of the Year Reading Activities
As the new school year begins, we’re back to focusing on establishing routines and planning ways to set our kids up for success in their learning from day one. And the subject of reading is no different! Setting expectations for reading, choosing goals, and building skills like sharing ideas and responding verbally are super important for the start of the year.
I’ve put together a whole bundle of lessons that are perfect as beginning of the school year reading activities. The aim is to help our kids build meaningful relationships with books and explore the skills needed to read and respond to books with the teacher and their classmates. Below we’ll dive into three of the lessons to give you a taste of what you can expect in the bundle. Let’s set our kids up for their best year of reading yet!
1. Memorable Book Bin
This activity is about building connections between the books we read and events, feelings, and relationships in our own lives. By making connections-to-self, our kids begin to empathize and understand characters and actions on a deeper level and develop inferential comprehension skills.
Let’s look at this activity in a bit more detail:
Start by discussing that stories are often based on things that happen in real life! And when we read, we often find that what happens to the characters in stories, has happened to us at some time in our lives. This is how we connect with books and how stories can help us understand and share about our own feelings and experiences.
Then you can introduce your memorable book bin – a pre-prepared collection of books that are memorable to you! Take out each book and explain why it’s memorable to you, e.g. a personal connection to the story or characters or that it was given to you by a friend or family member.
Finish by asking your kids to share about their own experiences with books! They can share with a partner or in writing, depending on their age group. They can write the title, draw the book cover, and record using a sentence starter: “This book was memorable because…”
You can get this lesson and 19 more in the First 20 Days of Reading Instruction resource!
2. Independent reading expectations
Setting up the practice of independent reading with your kids is a great way to make sure it’s done effectively all year long! A fun way to do this is to involve your kids in the process and build expectations and rules together.
Let’s take a closer look at this activity:
You can start by building an anchor chart together of your expectations for independent reading. Include appropriate reading behaviors including the idea of building stamina. Expectations can include:
- Read the whole time
- Stay in one spot
- Never bother the teacher when they have a reading group
Next, have some fun with roleplaying! Model both inappropriate behaviors that hinder reading growth, and appropriate behaviors that foster reading improvement. Show your kids the best areas for reading such as chairs or comfy spots around the room.
Now it’s time to practice and reflect! Start independent reading time, quietly observing students without disrupting their focus. When students begin to lose concentration, gather them on the carpet. Ask your kids to self-assess using the expectations chart by displaying fingers to show how many expectations they met during reading, keeping their responses to themselves. Chat about which expectations were easy or more challenging and set goals for the next session.
Challenge! Record the total minutes spent reading independently successfully and track this daily. Challenge your students to building their independent reading stamina and even choose a whole class reward if they achieve a certain number of minutes!
You can get this lesson and 19 more in the First 20 Days of Reading Instruction resource!
3. How to respond to reading verbally
This activity introduces the Reading Salad – a fun, visual strategy to help your kids begin to read, stop, and think about what they have read, then share ideas, questions, or predictions about the story.
The lesson could look like this:
Set up an anchor chart and introduce the Reading Salad. The Reading Salad is a hands-on way to show how readers interact with the text by thinking and responding to the text. The text is represented by pieces of green construction paper cut into rectangles. The thinking is represented by pieces of red construction paper cut into rectangles. Place a salad bowl in front of you along with the two stacks of colored construction paper.
Now it’s time to read! Read aloud a mentor text, pausing to make your reading salad by adding green paper to the bowl when you read the text and red paper when you think aloud about the text and share a response. Ask your kids to listen to a portion of the book read aloud, holding up a red piece of construction paper when they have a thought.
Next, ask your kids to share their thinking! Choose several students to share their thinking with the whole class. Record some of their thoughts on sticky notes and add them to the anchor chart. As students share their thinking, you can also label the comprehension strategy by saying, “That’s a great question!”, “You’ve made a good prediction,” etc.
You can get this lesson and 19 more in the First 20 Days of Reading Instruction resource!
Grab the ready-to-go Beginning of the Year Reading Activities!
You’ll find all three lessons above in my bundle First 20 Days of Reading Lesson Plans + Beginning of Year Books and Activities. This pack also includes goal setting activities, a library checklist for teachers, mentor book lists, student reading surveys and reading logs, and so much more!
