What is the Classroom Book a Day Challenge?
The Classroom Book a Day challenge was started by a K-5 librarian named Jillian Heise and can be found on all social media platforms as @heisereads. It’s as simple as it sounds, you simply read a picture book every day aloud to your students!
As a child, I can remember reading series such as Junie B. Jones in second grade. I remember being so excited to get the ENTIRE series for Christmas that year. I couldn’t put the books down!!!! After that, I wanted to go on every adventure Jack and Annie from The Magic Tree House. Then, when I discovered the Goosebumps series, I fell in love with a whole new genre. The list continues on into young adulthood and adulthood. We all have those series that we run to, that we depend on, that we can count on. We found that love of books by reading books. It’s really just that simple. What better way to expose children to all different kinds of genres than through picture books? Who knows, they may just find the series or genre that they will fall in love with!
How the Classroom Book a Day challenge has affected my students:
It is currently February 25th, 2019, which means it has been five months of the Classroom Book a Day challenge. In these months, I’ve noticed a difference with my students. The population that I serve is usually very hesitant to write. They don’t enjoy reading or writing and they certainly don’t write or read for fun. As educators, we know that the majority of these students feel this way because they haven’t experienced reading a good book that makes them think and wonder, that gives them goosebumps, or makes them sob at the end of end of reading it, as they wished it never ended.
ENTER: Classroom Book a Day challenge.
Since beginning this journey in September of 2018, I’ve watched my students grow as reader and writers. You may be wondering, but how? Well, I have a student who has an entire series written (on her free time, mind you) known as Bad Cat in our Classroom! See the pictures below.
This student took this Classroom Book a Day challenge and ran with it. There are even more stories in her Bad Cat series than what I’m showing you! As she started coming in every other day with an addition to her series, students began putting in their REQUESTS for the next title in her series. Slowly but surely, one night, I had 15 out of 28 students go home and write their very own stories for “HOMEWORK.” No, I never assigned it, they chose to do this on their own. Whatttttt! I’m not kidding, this actually happened.
I have students who wouldn’t pick up a book before ask me to go to our classroom library and “Please, oh, please, can I borrow this teacher read aloud?”
Or after a hesitant reader finished reading a book, they’ve looked at me and asked “Ms. Garabito, can I pleaseeeeee read the classroom read aloud today, I loved this book and I think the class will like it too!” After I, of course, had to say yes, they took the book home and planned out the questions they were going to ask on post it’s so they were prepared (they make me so proud)!
This became an epidemic in my classroom, but the best kind of epidemic you could have.
When I realized how seriously my students were taking this classroom challenge, I was nervous I was going to run out of books to read aloud so I relied on my Donors Choose page to help me fund even more classroom read alouds! To learn more about classroom funding options you can click here.
In the beginning of the year, I made a commitment to try this out and just see what happens. Some educators around me were nervous and started asking “Well what is that going to take the place of” or “Are we even allowed to do that?” I just put my head down, closed my door and kept on doing it. And boy, has that paid off.
Because I saw a spark ignite some of my most hesitant readers and writers, I decided to set up an author visit to meet my favorite picture book author of all time: Tomie dePaola. I was able to coordinate with the owner of the book store known as Books of Wonder and my school building, to take my students into Manhattan to meet him AND receive DONATED copies of his books, with a signature of course. What a life changing experience that was for them!
All in all, this challenge has been an amazing experience for both my students and I. I feel the passion for reading more now than ever before!
I’ve created a FREE Classroom Book a Day Student Rating form, grab yours by clicking here.
Xo,