#classroombookaday 2018 begins!

This year we began the 3rd iteration of the #classroombookaday challenge in 1st grade at Robinson! I am ready for this to be the BEST year ever of the challenge! Originally I would have said that it was because we’d read even more books than last year (our final number was 560!), but now I’d say there’s another reason. The first year I participated, my neighbor and friend Ms. Turken did it with me, but hung her own display and read different books than we did in our room. Last year, as we began our official co-teaching journey together, we combined our challenge and our display and read 560 of the same books together (some chosen by her, some chosen by me, some chosen by 1st graders). And since I was a lazy blogger last year and didn’t tell you all about that journey, let me post the pictures of our final wall now. :). It’s pretty great!

As a side note, we got to the end of the school year and were a little uncertain about what we should do with our display. I mean, come on, it was as much an art piece as it was a record of the great books we’d read! My very smart friend, Marcie, suggested that I take it all down and save the pictures to use again this year (which I admit is a VERY smart and practical thing to do but one I had never considered LOL). We didn’t have time to do this before we left for the summer so we did the next best thing: covered it up and crossed our fingers that it would be in tact and ready for us to take apart when we came back in August.

Thankfully it survived the unpredictability of summer cleaning and moving, and we were able to keep most of the books we had hung last year. I guess we even started the year ahead of the game!

So, now we get to this year. This year Ms. Turken and I are again collaborating to choose books for the wall, but we’ve also rallied the rest of our team to join in!! The more the merrier–more teachers and more first grade readers hearing so many great books! It has meant that our pace is a little slower than year’s past (since we have to have more classes read the book before it can be posted), but I’m convinced it’s totally worth it because we are including so many more kiddos in the joy of reading and watching the wall fill up!

As we finished day 17 of school (which is roughly 3 1/2 weeks), we have read and posted 42 books! Many of them are repeats from last year (because some books are TOO GOOD not to read again!), but since we’re including new teachers, we’ve read just as many new ones, too. Win, win, right??