Professional Reading

Today I'm linking up with one of my fellow VA bloggers, Andrea at Reading Toward the Stars, for her Book Talk Thursday linky. The idea is easy and super fun - write a post about any type of book and link up. Every time you link up you are entered to win a $25 Barnes and Nobel gift card! Woot woot! 

As soon as I heard about this linky I knew I had to review one of my all time favorite teaching books. I am a teaching book junkie! I have two whole shelves of teaching books at school!! 

My very first year of teaching I went to a great workshop where I was given a copy of this book - Why Didn't I Learn This in College? As a new teacher, when I sat down to read this I kept asking myself - why didn't I learn this in college? It is really a great resource! 

There are several sections of the book that offer ideas for actively engaging students in lessons and they are great!! Anytime I'm planning lessons and feel like I need a fresh, new idea I always turn to this book. There are some really easy, fun ideas that don't take a lot of time to prepare. 

The book is geared toward new teachers, so there are some sections that veterans would want to skim over, but even those sections offer some really great tips. I just finished up my 7th year teaching and I still look at this book. 

Remember that whole crazy shelf of books I was talking about? This is the one I use the most from that shelf. In fact I love it so much that when I had a student teacher a few years ago I added this book to her end of the year gift.  

I wanted to share one more teacher book I just started reading, Help for Struggling Readers. 

I got this book as a freebie at a workshop I attend earlier this spring. Today I decided to pick it up and was pleasantly surprised with what I found. The book is broken down into 6 sections, each one corresponding to a stage of reading development. Each section gives strategies for helping move students through that particular stage in reading development. 

All the strategies are research based and seem to be very easy to implement At the end of each strategy there are lists of modifications and also more books on the topic. I really like revisiting these types of books as a refresher on research based strategies I may have forgotten about and as a way to learn some new ones as well. 

I think this will be one of my go to books this year. The format is super easy, you can quickly scan through the strategies to choose one you want. I also like that the book is all about strategies to help students. This is not one of those books that takes up half the pages describing students who are struggling readers - I know what they look like just tell me some ways I can help them! This book does just that! Another plus - it is written for grades 3-8, so the strategies aren't things that bigger kids would embarrassed about!