With all the concepts about setting up your room and gathering materials in chapter 3, the thing I most focused on was teaching my studetns the concept of a "good fit" book.
My assistants and I implemented the lesson outlined in the book that shows kids the concept of a good fit compared to the concept of shoes fitting well. I brought in my husband's golf shoes, my scuba diving fins, my niece's tennis shoes (who is 3), a pair of high heels, etc. The kids really started to understand that there was a difference to purpose and interest.
We have all of our books in bins and labeled according to their levels. The students had their individual levels assigned to them and posted in the reading log folders. I was in for a BIG surprise, however.
Shame on me....because they could pick out books in the library according to their levels and because they could tell me their levels, I assumed they could find them from our classroom library too. Wrong! They didn't understand the concept of a range. So when I pulled out books and was showing them how to return them to our classroom library, I got lots of nods. When I handed each child a random book and asked them to return it to the classroom library, they couldn't do it. They didn't know that the bucket labeled 2.0-2.4, included levels 2.0, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3 and 2.4.
When I figured out they couldn't return books to the right spot, I decided to ask them to show me which buckets they would look in if they wanted to find a book at their level....again, they didn't know how to do it!
We had to have several days of practicing cleaning up the books and finding books in their ranges before they understood this.
That was a good wake up call for me. I didn't really even think about understanding the concept of a range being a prerequisite skill for be able to access books quickly and easily at their levels.
