Eating and Reading! Two of My Favorite Things

It's been a busy time in my fourth grade classroom.  We have been working our behinds off (in between snow days-of course). One of the things we just began was a Lunch Time Book Club.

I read the first two books of the Keepers of the School sereis by Andrew Clements to my class.  They loved it and wanted to read more. So we decided to create a lunch time book club where we can gether once a week to chat about what we have been reading at home.  The problem- the reading level of the book is too high for most of my kiddos to read independently.  So I did what any teacher would do and recorded my own audio book.  Yup just me, some snow days, ITunes, and me reading aloud to my dog Copper.  


Once the audio recording was completed I downloaded the playlist to 10 IPods I have for use in my classroom.  (They were a Black Friday deal a few years ago and have been worth every cent.)  

The kids LOVED that all they had to do was pop in some ear buds and they could listen to me read to them during Readers Workshop.  Since I only had 10 IPods that means some of my studnets, the ones who could, would have to read the novel themselves.  Of course they wanted to listen to an IPod, but they were real troopers when I reminded them that this was differentiation and that meant everyone gets what they need to get better. This was a concept we have discussed since September and one they have really embraced.  

Here is one of my lovelies reading listening and reading along.
(Notice the IPod on his chest)

We started this past Thursday and were supposed to have our second meeting today, but Snowmagedon had other plans for us. I REALLY love the fact that instead of heading to the APR for lunch they would rather hang in the classroom eating...AND TALKING ABOUT BOOKS!

Stay Warm Buddies!
-Damien