The Literate Teacher's Manifesto

One of my classroom convictions (that's what I call them instead of resolutions) for 2018 is to do better about giving consistent book talks. I tend to be a little sporadic and give a bunch of book talks at once, and then forget to do it again for a couple of weeks. So, I started in mid-January (we missed a lot of school because of bad weather and a lot of class because of testing), giving a book talk every day. Last week, I talked about historical fiction. This week, I knew I wanted to talk about dystopian books, because I have a lot of kids who said they wanted to branch out into new genres during the second half of the year, and dystopian was a genre that was mentioned frequently. And then I came up with an idea that I think will be beneficial to my readers, but that will also keep me on track with my book talks. I went to a Book Love  workshop with Penny Kittle last year, and she talked about how to build reading ladders (a la Teri Lesesne) with genre. Thus, reading ladder bo...