Starting our Book Challenge!

*Spoiler! This post contains heavy math that I'm not at all comfortable using. I apologize ahead of time.
     I mentioned in previous posts about my reading goals for students to be working on this year. I work with three block classes throughout the day (68 students) and work hard on building a love of reading throughout the year. One of the strategies I am implementing this year to encourage reading is creating a Book Challenge for the students to participate in. Our goal is to read 750 books by the end of the school year. Each class is responsible for reading 250 books by the end of the year, which breaks down to each student (roughly) reading 10 books. I decided to make it 250 for everyone, even though I knew a few of my classes don't have 25 students. My goal is to encourage each student to read more than the required 10, therefore reaching, and hopefully beating, our goal of 750. We are incorporating technology into the reading process, so students have access to reading apps such as Epic! and MyOn, as well.
     We discussed and began working on this goal the second week of school. However, it isn't until this week that I was able to create our "bookshelf" to showcase student books. I was not disappointed! Within 24 hours of posting our board, students began filling it. I could not be happier with our success so far!

     Each student being required to read 10 books this year breaks up into two and a half books a quarter. It is the end of September, and first quarter ends October 27th. That leaves us one more month to reach our quarterly goal. I have high hopes! Some of my students have already read two or more books, and most of the rest are finishing their first books this week.
     Along with finishing books and completing our reading challenge, we have been working on being able to read for extended periods of time. We began the year reading 5 minutes each day during class. We have slowly added time over the weeks and now students are reading for almost 20 minutes. I am super impressed! Extending this reading time throughout class has done wonders with students reading and having more open discussions with their table partners.
     Feel free to check back frequently and ask about our success throughout the year!

With love,

💜Ms. Haury