Books

Books are one of my favorite things about teaching. If you would give me the chance to just sit down and read a book all day I would love it. I love learning about new things. My favorite is when you are reading a book and your are so into the book you forget about everything else around you. I wish I could remember the first time I fell in love with reading. I remember in high school I would read like a book a day. Unfortunately, life has gotten a little more busy since then and I don’t get the opportunity to read as much.

            As a teacher I want my students to fall in love with reading. I want them to find a book they really like and tell me all about what happens. At our school we do not have a library. Instead each classroom is supposed to have their own classroom library. My first two years of teaching my classroom library maybe had thirty books and half of them had all the pages in them. Over the summer I got a large donation of books. I was sooooo excited for my kids. I had about 150 books on my bookshelf at the beginning of the year. My kids were so excited at the beginning of the year to have nice books. I was really nervous that they were going to ruin the books by the end of the year. So I left a stack of my favorite books at my house. Long story short I completely forgot about this stack of books until I cleaned my house last weekend.

            My students have been reading the books I had donated to me over the summer from cover to cover. It’s so fun watching them enjoy reading telling their classmates about these books. I have one student who I have been working on English very hard. This student read their very first book in English all by themselves last week. The student went up to the front of the classroom all excited and goes, “Everyone be quiet.” He proceeded to open up his book and read the whole book in front of the class. By some miracle the whole class sat quietly and listened to the student read the whole story. When the student finished they all started cheering. These are the moments that I love love love teaching because I like seeing them accomplish something and be so proud of themselves.

            This week I decided to bring in the books that I had found while cleaning the house. It almost seemed like Christmas morning with all my students reading these new books. They were all so excited to have new books to read. I have never seen them all sit down and read a book at the same time. I guess when I have good books they will happily sit down and read them.

With Love,

Abby