Creating a Culture of Reading: Picture Book Companions to Save You Time

by Adrienne · August 2, 2022

I don’t know about you, but in my 11 years of teaching, I have had quite a few days where I run around nonstop all day, just to wonder on the drive home if I actually did anything today. Did I actually make a difference today? Did I teach the content in a way they could learn? Did I engage and excite them? Self-doubt. Imposter syndrome. It happens to the best of us.

A couple years ago, I found a way to combat this. I told myself that as long as I read a book to my students, I enhanced their day.

At the time I was departmentalized and taught reading to 3 groups of students. When I felt myself beginning to doubt after a hard day, I told myself what I know:

I know studies show the overwhelming benefit of kids being read to, on a regular basis, with fluency.
I know that exposing children to different genres and authors gets them interested and exploring those genres/authos which leads to more independent reading on their part.
I know that research shows independent reading is the practice that has the most impact on a child’s reading growth.

That was that. As long as I read a book to them, I refused to allow myself to unravel.

After I made the decision that I wanted to read aloud a book each day to my students (regardless of the current unit), I saw a great impact. More so than the years before, my class became a group of learners that valued reading. If an early dismissal or assembly altered our schedule, I would have to find another time to squeeze in the read aloud because the kids were not willing to take a day off.

How my A-Book-A-Day resource got it’s start

The problem that I found was that so much went in to choosing and prepping for quality read alouds.

Whenever possible, I aligned the daily read aloud to the unit and skills I was teaching that week. If I was teaching a unit that didn’t lend itself well, I will still try to match all the read alouds for the week in some way so that our conversation and understanding would build throughout the week.

I eventually sat down and made a big list of all the topics I wanted to cover in the unit I was currently in. I added my favorite read alouds under each topic and then pulled out my computer and researched until I had 5 books under each header, one for each day of the week.

I knew I wanted to share this resource to help teachers fulfill their #abookaday challenge in a meaningful and simple way without compromising consistency or depth.

I try to plan my read alouds a unit at a time so that I am not scrambling, but I was still winging it through the read aloud unless I had set aside time to come up with questions that allowed my students to make connections, infer, or compare. I wanted to plan extension opportunities for eager kids or for when we had extra time.

I started creating mini PowerPoints for the read alouds so that everything would be in one place when I sat down to read the book of the day. Those PowerPoints have been combined and polished to create my A-Book-A-Day resource that I hope will help other teachers implement a book a day in an easier and more consistent way.

What is included in this resource?

Once I had taught through a week of the original A-Book-A-Day resource I created, I had a better idea of what I needed and wanted to include in each product. Each week of resources comes with:

Mini-Lesson PowerPoint to guide your students through your read aloud (You can use as many or as few of the slides as you need!)
PDF printable resources (See below to learn how these add value to your read alouds.)
Response slides in Google Classroom
Response slides formatted for Microsoft Teams

What is included in each mini lesson PowerPoint?

3 “Before Reading” slides to introduce the text, get the students thinking, and set a purpose for reading
Link to an online read aloud for when you don’t have a physical copy of the book
3 “After Reading” slides including a discussion question, writing prompt, and 5 open-ended comprehension questions from the text
Closure slide to reiterate the lesson or purpose of the read aloud

preview-book-a-day-THEME-1 Download

What is included in the PDF portion?

Teacher Guide
Book spines for book a day display (Check out some of my bulletin boards below!)
Bookshelf decor item for bookshelf display
Book covers for book a day display
Graphic Organizer that fits the genre or topic of books included
Story Retell Sheet
Book Recommendation Sheet
5 open-ended question comprehension check (specific questions for each book)