Text Sets – A(nother) Year of Reading

Franki’s Weekly Text Set: Falling in Love with Words and Word Play

Texts for this Text Set have been posted daily on Instagram. Follow @TextSets there to get daily updates!

Early in the school year (all year round, actually. But especially early in the year), I always think it’s a good idea for children to experience joy around word and language. So often we focus on the skills of words and forget to weave in all the joy that goes along with words. I have found that elementary students are much better able to pay attention to the skills of words (vocabulary, parts of speech, spelling patterns, etc.) once they see how amazing words are. This week’s books will invite students to delight in words. This can also serve as a follow-up to the Launching Notebooks Text Set from a few weeks ago–kids will want to try a few of these on their own because they are such fun!

I picked up this GIANT book at Cover to Cover last week. I mean who doesn’t need a GIANT joke book. One that is called Wee Hee Hee? I think jokes are a great way to talk about words with kids. So many jokes and riddles for kids depend on word play. This book is filled with fun jokes and riddles. The size of the book, the colors on the pages and the jokes make this book pure fun!

Words is a fun word play book that children will want to experiment with. The book is a small chunky book (another great fun size!) and each page has a single word and a sketch. Seeing how each book is imagined and then thinking about ways to create an image for a single word takes so much creativity.

Take Away the A and Fruit Cake are two books that provide more fun for readers. They also invite readers to try these things on their own. Take Away the A shows readers how much taking away one letter in a word can change it. Fruit Cake is often out of print so sometimes difficult to find but it is well worth it if you can find it. The theme combined with the play on words make it very unique.

Who doesn’t like a good tongue twister? That’s what you get in Six Sheep Sip Thick Shakes. And Beach is to Fun is the most fun introduction to analogies I’ve ever seen. When I used Beach is to Fun with 4th graders a few years back, everyone wanted to write their own! I wish someone had introduced analogies to me with this book (instead of with multiple choice bubbles…).

The titles alone make both Llamaphones and Yaks Yak fabulous. These two help children start conversations about the discipline specific words we use when we talk about words (Homophones and Homographs, Nouns and Verbs). I mean who could forget what a homophone is if it is introduced as a llamaphone?

This week’s books were linked at Bookelicious and/or Cover to Cover Children’s Bookstore. If you are looking for a fabulous local children’s bookstore to support, Cover to Cover is an amazing one. We are lucky to have them in Central Ohio! If you don’t have an independent children’s bookstore in your town, check out Bookelicious. They are an online independent bookstore for children with an incredible curated collection. (Warning: You will want to create a bookmoji while you are there. This will be the highlight of your weekend I’m sure! Below is one of mine:-)

Franki’s Weekly Text Set–Nonfiction Picture Book Series for Elementary Readers

Texts for this Text Set have been posted daily on Instagram.

Follow @TextSets there to get daily updates!

Many of us can remember favorite series books from childhood–those books we read nonstop, those books that were so important on our journeys to becoming lifelong readers. We know how important series books are for young readers and that is true for both fiction and nonfiction. I remember when I read my first Scientists in the Field series as a teacher. I loved it so much that I read others that were not even on topics I thought I was interested in. During the last several years, having baskets of nonfiction series books was important for classroom library set up.

If we want our students to choose to read nonfiction, we have to invite them in in a variety of ways. Series books invited children into nonfiction reading by giving them a collection that could expand the topics they read and support them as readers as they knew what to expect from the next book in the series. They build different skills as different series require different skills as readers. Nonfiction series books are a great invitation for readers to read more nonfiction, to expand topics they love, to get to know nonfiction authors and to build strategies as nonfiction readers. This week’s text set will highlight some series books I’ve found to be popular with elementary readers in grades K-5. These books are perfect for all ages as there are several entry points depending on the reader.

Suzi Eszterhas is one of my favorite nonfiction authors. She is a wildlife photographer so the photos in every one of her books are incredible and they engage readers immediately. This series–Eye on the Wild–focuses on the first year in a baby animal’s life. Suzi Eszterhas has other books and series (Wildlife Rescue)–all about animals– so this series is a great way to introduce this incredible author.

Two other authors who have several nonfiction series books for young readers are Melissa Stewart and Kate Messner. A Place for Birds and Over and Under are two series that have so much interesting content. I love these because understanding of the bigger science concepts build across the series. So the more children read in the series, the better they understand the bigger, complex concepts of our environment.

The Truth About series is a fun series with lots of entry points. There is a lot of content packed into a fun format and readers enjoy the humor throughout. We are lucky to have so many great series books about animals as so many children are interested in animals. Reading across a series or finding a variety of books about a single animals support young readers and there are plenty of options for laddering their reading (Thanks Dr. Teri Lesesne for teaching us about Reading Ladders!).

The If Animals Disappeared Series is a powerful one in helping children (and adults) understand the interconnectedness of our world. These books are packed with information and also make for great read alouds. The author makes a very complex issue accessible for our youngest children.

Jess Keating is definitely an author that knows how to engage young readers. Her photos, her sense of humor and her expert knowledge of the topics she writes about make every one of her books a must-read. Jess Keating has two nonfiction series books that engage readers of all ages. Big as a Giant Snail and Set Your Alarm, Sloth! are both new this fall so celebrating these book birthdays would be a great way to introduce the series.

Franki’s Weekly Text Set-Launching the Writer’s Notebook

Texts for this Text Set have been posted daily on Instagram. Follow @TextSets there to get daily updates!

It’s the time of year where many of us are launching writer’s notebooks with our students. During these first weeks of writing, we want children to become confident writers, to find joy in writing and to see what’s possible. As a teacher my goal, thanks to the work of Shelley Harwayne has been on volume and variety. Over the years, I have relied on picture books to support this phase of the school year and I keep refreshing the set of books I use.

List writing is one of the best ways I’ve found to engage writers who have not had great experiences with writing. Creating lists is sometimes a great way for these writers to ease into writing. And let’s face it, list writing is part of every writer’s life. These books (I Wish You Knew, I Am Every Good Thing, What I Am, and My Heart Fills With Happiness) invite list writing by following the thread of the book. Reading one of these books and inviting students to make a list similar to what the author did is a good option for writers during those first days of workshop.

Writers often write about places they love. This set of books (My Casa is My Home, From My Window, and In My Mosque) does that but in three very different ways. For writers who struggle with a topic, place is something that gives lots of options. I have used these books along with the map in Ralph Fletcher’s Marshfield Dreams to think about writing and drawing about places that are important to us.

We want our students to learn from other writers and one way we do that is to play with mimicking or copying something a writer does-playing with it a bit. Guess Who, Haiku and Ribbit! both invite writers to Try it! Trying to write a riddle Haiku or trying to write a description with the 3 sentence part used so obviously in Ribbit! make for a fun day in writing workshop. This type of writing invitation encourages young writers to play with language-to have fun with it!

Writers use their senses and these two books help young writers see what is possible when they do that. Hello, Rain! is a poem in picture book format and the whole book describes a rainy day. Writers might think about describing something in a poetic way. And Listen reminds writers that sound is an important part of description.

So much of our writing revolves around people, especially those that we love. There are so many ways to show our love of the favorite people in our life though writing. Each of these 3 books– My Papi Has a Motorcycle, Not Enough Emilys in Hey World, Here I Am, and Your Mama–does this in different ways and each is accessible to young writers.

Franki’s Weekly Text Set-Studying Font Across Genres

Texts for this Text Set have been posted daily on Instagram. Follow @TextSets there to get daily updates!

This week’s Text Set focuses on font changes across. This is a great quick study to do early in the school year as it creates access points into mentor texts for all readers and writers. The books shared this week have font changes that can be studies for readers (how the font change impacts meaning) as well as for writers as they find possibilities for their own writing.

I Can Make a Train Noise is the perfect book to begin a mini-unit on fonts and font changes. The same line repeats itself throughout the book (“I can make a train noise now.”) but the size and layout of the words change. The font tells the reader how they might read the words differently on each page. This is a book that readers of all ages will have fun with and then will be able to learn about font choices throughout.

Poetry is always important when looking at font. These two books give readers and writers so much to think about. In No Voice Too Small, the concrete poem about Mari Copeny: Little Miss Flint (Written by Carole Boston Weathorford) is worth studying when it comes to font. The choices in which words to enlarge is important for readers and writers. In Have I Ever Told You Black Lives Matter, each page is a work of art in the way the words are placed on the page, the size and color of words, etc.

Font changes in narrative can be fun and it doesn’t take a lot of font changes to give new meaning or emphasize dialogue, etc. One Word from Sophia is a book that plays a bit with font and the choices of each font change can be invitations for writers to try something new in their own narratives.

Curious Comparisons uses a variety of fonts and sizes in the way the book is formatted. Different information is given with different fonts and the layout/font choices on any individual page would make a great mini lesson. As our students write informational texts, font and layout are critical visual pieces and this is a great nonfiction book to invite those possibilities.

The picture book biography, Shirley Chisholm is a Verb, is an incredible story of Shirley Chisholm. The verbs in the book–that tell so much about the impact Shirley Chisholm has made are in different fonts and colors. Discussing the ways font is used to highlight important ideas throughout is the way I’d start this conversation and invitation for readers and writers. #TextSets #kitlit #BuildYourStack #MentorTexts