Check out my first Prezi!  It’s a presentation for students.  I want to impress upon my first graders that the time they spend learning about and practicing reading and writing will BENEFIT THEM!  =D

This Prezi is also available to view on my website: http://jmeacham.com/balanced%20literacy/balanced.literacy.htm.

I needed THESE like three years ago!  LOL.  Seriously!  Have you ever found yourself saying to yourself or asking yourself:

• “Hmmm….WHAT books do I need for this upcoming unit?”
• “Ugh!  I can’t remember which library that book was from!”

If you know me at all, you know I adore, Adore, ADORE books.  I strive to read aloud six books each day (at least).  Including our chapter book read aloud.  With that, it takes a lot to keep the books organized in my mind.  And therein lies the problem.  I’m getting older.  I easily forget things.  Sigh.  With over 2,000 books in my personal classroom library, and many more available through my school library and WONDERFUL public library system, I need to be more organized!  So, I created a help sheet.  A cheat sheet!

I will use it to help me remember which books I need to collect before a unit/lesson/activity. I will use it to help me remember WHERE the books are located (CL, SL, PL).

I will use it to help me know which books might be useful to add to my personal collection.

There may be more uses…

But I’ll sign off for now.  Grab ‘em here (reading) and here (writing)!

The units have been updated to include new lessons and read alouds.  The last update happened last spring, so if you haven’t downloaded these in a while, you might want to gram them now!  

Want to motivate your students as they read this coming year?  Wish to inspire them, motivate them, and encourage them to read, read, and READ?  Me too.  =)

I’ve been noticing a lot of really neat reading quotes on Pinterest lately.  Along with interesting pictures, sculptures, and videos.  The WWW is full of them!

Oh…and last year I started reading a great book by Steven Layne (Igniting a Passion for Reading).  It’s my goal to finish reading it this summer…  We shall see.  So far it’s been GREAT.

Well, this book, and all these reading inspirations that I’ve noticed on the web lately, got me thinking.  Why not share some of them with my students AND motivate/encourage/inspire them at the same time?  I initially wanted to find 180 pictures/videos to share, one for each day of the school year, but that proved to be VERY difficult.  Plus, they wouldn’t have fit on one SMARTnotbook slide, and if you know me, I like neat, tidy, concise, simple….well you get the idea.  Plus, we all know that some days…there’s just not time for ONE little extra thing.

So I set out to find as many as I could, and walla….we now have 87 inspirations/motivations to share with our kiddos.  How it works:  I plan on opening the file on days where I feel we have time.  I plan to only take 1-4 minutes on this activity.  When the file is open, a student will touch one of the squares, revealing the picture behind the cell/table shade.  They’ll touch it again to open the link.  If it is a video, we will watch it and then have a short conversation about we noticed and what we can learn from it.  If it is a picture, I’ll ask the class to tell me what they notice about the picture.  We’ll talk about what the ‘author’s purpose’ is…what message is the poster/picture telling us.  We will then SAVE the file and exit out of it.  I plan on doing this activity before or after the Reader’s Workshop lesson.  Or we could also do it just before session one of D5.

This will be a NEW addition to my classroom this year, so if you also decide to embark on this journey with me, feel free to contact me with feedback.  We can work together to tweak it for the following year.

File: Reading Motivation