March Book Madness… Books Always Win! 

Day 4 of the March Slice of Life Challenge hosted by the Two Writing Teachers! #SOL25

March Book Madness is one of my favorite parts of the school year. With the support of our generous PTO, my fifth grade team is able to purchase new titles for each of our classrooms.  Beginning in January, students participate in a “book tasting” and form book clubs. Their goal is to read as many of the titles as they can before voting begins in March. We also read two books together during our class read aloud time. The collaboration, discussions, love, and overall motivation to read and talk about books is at an all time high. It makes me reflect about the growth of the readers in my classroom–especially those who were “fake” reading and/or struggling to read a solid 20 minutes when they joined our classroom at the beginning of the year. 

This year, as a culminating project I had students create “Extra, Extra, Read All About it!” posters highlighting (and also hopefully convincing their audience) which March Book Madness title they thought was the best and why (no spoilers of course). Their posters were beautiful and creative and they were so engaged from start to finish. 

Voting officially begins tomorrow! It’s okay though… books always win! And my heart is full. At the beginning of this challenge, a book club came to me and shared, “Mrs. K, we’ve never read a book in a week before.” Their book club read SIX books! Woohoo!

Real books and time to read them matters. ❤