Books Teachers Love – September Books For Your Classroom

Back To School, Literacy

I’ve rewritten the beginning of this post about five times now due to extreme sleep deprivation. I know you feel my pain when I say…I had my first back to school dream last night…followed by me waking up to create labels for my math center drawers…at 3:30 a.m. No logic behind that because school doesn’t start for another two weeks. #TeacherProblems

Luckily, the rest of this post was a breeze to write because I had already created a fun FREEBIE for this month’s Books Bloggers Love Blog Hop.

For those of you who are joining for the first time this month, WELCOME! Your brain is about to overflow with amazing read aloud ideas from some of my favorite bloggers. Your Amazon wish list will likely overflow with new books. You may even (fingers crossed) win a few new books for your own classroom library.

Books Teachers Love My Book Section Header

My read aloud this month is all about helping you squeeze academic standards into your community building during the first month of school.

This School Year Will Be The Best! book cover and interactive read aloud lesson plans

The book This School Year Will Be The Best! By Kay Winters is perfect for bringing your class together to build excitement for the year. Simultaneously, you can teach reading literature standards about how illustrations and words work together to help readers understand the characters, setting and plot of a story.

The sentences in this book are short and sweet and the illustrations brilliantly bring the words to life, making this book perfect for an interactive read aloud. Here are a few discussion questions to help focus the observations and discussions your students may have:

What details does the illustration show to bring the story to life?
How are the details in the illustration more specific than the words alone?
How does this illustration add humor to the story?
What details do you see in this illustration that weren’t written in the sentence?

This School Year Will Be The Best peek inside the book

After the interactive read aloud, your class can work together to create their own version of the book This School Year Will Be The Best!

Each student can design a page with one sentence about something that would make this his/her best school year ever. They can then add an illustration that supports their sentence with more meaning and detail.

The pages of your new class book will be the perfect focal point for sharing during morning meeting or for a partner share activity. Once everyone has shared, you can bind the book pages together and add it to your classroom library.

Interested in trying this activity in your own classroom? Grab my FREEBIE for a full lesson plan and printables for your own class book.