I'm moving from Year 3 to Year 6 in 2019. A colleague of mine is moving from Year 1 to my Year 3 classroom, and as she's been moving her teaching resources to her new room, she's been asking me about books that my Year 3 students have really enjoyed this year.
And that got me thinking: "Did I write that blog post about Reader's Workshop yet?"
The answer was: "No." Whoops! I intended to write this at the end of Term 2, after we'd created our book cubbies, but it must have slipped my mind.
Book Recommendations
During Reader's Workshop, I start with a mini-lesson on a particular reading strategy I think needs covering (as a result of reflection time and individual student conferencing, as well as what's planned for the term). To model the reading strategy, I use picture books. Picture books are perfect, as they are short and many have interesting or complex language structures or visuals to unpack as part of a mini-lesson.
3BH's Favourites for 2018
Some of our favourite books this year were:
![]() |
http://www.aaronblabeybooks.com/books/stanley-paste |
We used this book to help us build our schema about friends and friendship at the beginning of the year. Using this reading strategy also helped us to build our classroom culture.
![]() |
http://www.aaronblabeybooks.com/sites/default/files/images/books/covers/hugcover.png |
This book helped us to infer - using the text clues (words and pictures) and our schema (what we already know) to find out the extra meaning. It's such a simple book, with so many layered nuances, that my less confident readers loved it, but my confident readers returned to it again and again to 'find' more meaning.
![]() |
http://www.aaronblabeybooks.com/sites/default/files/images/books/covers/p.jpg |
This one helped us build schema and understand difference, and helped us to begin to unpack stereotypes. Also, it's rhyming and funny!
![]() |
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/299101/each-kindness-by-jacqueline-woodson-illustrated-by-e-b-lewis/9780399246524/ |
This one I used for a few lessons: we built schema about friendship and bullying, we made text to self and text to world connections, and we practised questioning.
![]() |
https://www.penguin.com.au/books/go-go-and-the-silver-shoes-9780143785521 |
This book was an absolute favourite of one of my students! She read and reread this book so many times I lost count. It was another beautiful one to build schema about friendship, and text to self connections.
![]() |
https://www.roalddahl.com/roald-dahl/stories/k-o/matilda |
As a read aloud, Matilda was one of our clear favourites! My class loved this, and The Witches. I think the longevity of these books is the theme of children triumphing over wicked adults in zany and ingenious ways.
![]() |
http://diterlizzi.com/book/the-spiderwick-chronicles/ |
I also read the first Spiderwick book, which resulted in all the following books being borrowed from our school's library so that the students could find out what happened to Jared, Simon and Mallory.
![]() |
http://www.chrischeng.com/picture-books/python |
In second semester, we worked on reading non-fiction books, and what my teaching partner called 'faction' books - stories that have facts threaded throughout. We used summarising and research skills with these types of books, then created our own version of a 'faction' text.
![]() |
http://www.storybreathing.com/journey/ |
Finally, ANY wordless picture book is fantastic for schema, inferring, questioning, connecting - basically any reading strategy!
Book Tasting
At the end of Term 1, I hosted a Book Tasting for my class.
![]() |
Check out the post HERE! |
This was great fun, and introduced my class to new types of books. I especially loved watching them 'read' the wordless books!
Book Cubbies
At the end of Term 2, we designed, made, appraised, redesigned/remade some Book Cubbies to read in. This was an interesting experience for some of them, who were getting frustrated with their team members, and frustrated with the equipment (the pegs kept flying off!) but eventually, we all had a successful book cubby to sit or lie inside and spend some quality time reading.
There's a few ideas on some books to read, and some ways to incorporate and celebrate the joy of reading with Year 3! A huge thanks to Alison who prompted my memory - this post is a result of our chat! Thank you.
Thanks for dropping in,
Bec