Classroom Library

Our class' discussion on readability got me thinking about my own classroom library. Since this is my second year teaching, I do not have a lot of books. Most of the books I've collected last year were generously donated to me by teachers who have no need for them. But I was teaching first grade last year and now that I'm teaching third grade, I find that most of the books I have are not appropriate for my third graders. So I started the school year by borrowing books from the school library. The media specialist was kind enough to organize the books for me by genres. So I have enough books for students to read through during their D.E.A.R time or whenever they finish their work early.

However, given some time (and money), I would really like to started building an extensive classroom library for my students to enjoy. My inspiration comes from Beth Newingham, a fellow third grade teacher and writer for Scholastic. Her class' website can be found here. She has a ton of resources and ideas! Here is what her classroom library looks like. She has A LOT of books and they're all color coded, organized by genres/subjects, and each book is leveled. My dream classroom library would look something like hers. She uses the Scholastic Book Wizard to level her books, which I plan on using myself once I get more books of my own. Scholastic also has a great leveling chart that provides the matching reading levels, DRA level, and Lexile levels.

I am highly encouraged to level the books in my classroom library to track my students' reading. It will let me know if they are reading a book that is too easy, too hard, or just right for them.

Running Records

At the beginning of the school year, I had to do some running records to assess my students’ reading. I use running records to assess text difficulty and capture students’ progress. In addition, the running records provide me with the information I would need to form my guided reading groups. By placing them into small groups, I can work with students reading at or around the same level and I can target their needs on a small group basis. I found it easier to do running records last year as a first grade teacher since I used MClass and conducted the running records on a Palm pilot. There were prompts to guide me throughout the process and it was just a lot quicker on the Palm. I was also fortunate enough to have my reading specialist come in and model the MClass testing for me. I really lucked out to have her as my resource since she was in my classroom everyday for the entire reading block for a whole month! I am teaching third grade this year and we’re using Fontas & Pinell, everything is by hand and there is no one sitting next to me to guide me through the process. Needless to say, running records were a bit challenging and more time consuming to do this time around since I have to mark up the running records by hand. Therefore, the process took me a bit longer than I had planned so I ended up forming my small groups late towards the end of September. But now that running records are done and groups are formed, I can focus on instruction for my guided reading groups!

As a teacher, running records provide valuable information about my students as readers. As the students are reading, I can track their progress, determine what they already know as readers, what they are focusing on as readers, and what they have overlooked as readers. Running records also allow me to track the students' reading fluency and their reading behaviors. Although it requires effort and takes a lot of time, once done, running records are an invaluable piece of information.

Any thoughts on running records?