A favorite blog I follow is Nerdy Book Club. One post from this summer that I feel is worth sharing is 10 Mentor Texts To Lift the Level of Students' Narrative Writing . This collection isn't just a wonderfully diverse collection of outstanding picture books, but it offers craft moves as noted by the author of this blog post, Stacey Shubitz. Stacey is the author of Craft Moves: Lesson Sets for Teaching Writing with Mentor Texts.
Global Read Aloud (GRA) is a project started in 2010 by Pernille Ripp, a 7th Grade English Teacher here in Wisconsin. The premise of GRA is they pick a book to be read aloud to students during a set six-week period where during that time as many global connections are made as possible. It starts in early October and ends in mid-November. For elementary students the author study is Lauren Castillo, which includes her Caldecott Honor, Nana in the City and her newest book, Twenty Yawns as well as several others. The upper elementary/middle school titles are: The BFG, in honor of celebrating Roald Dahl's 100th birthday and Pax, Sara Pennypacker. I've read both of these wonderful stories! The selected titles for middle/high school check out Orbiting Jupiter by Gary D. Schmidt and All American Boys by Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely. Orbiting Jupiter is on my reading list, but I've read All American Boys, which I highly recommend for students, teachers, staff, parents and leaders of our communities. This 2016 Coretta Scott King Honor and Walter Dean Myers Award for Outstanding Literature is very timely in terms of the national conversation that tends to be in the news nearly on a daily basis in our lives.
I encourage teachers to consider participating in GRA for outstanding literature, a global conversation and much more!
