Welcome to Book Island!… A destination island located conveniently behind our classroom door where reading doesn’t take any space but my kids feel like they are doing something fun during the school day! This is also a great way to motivate summer reading!
Raise your hand if you remember Trapper-Keepers, lots of spiral notebooks, and cardboard pencil boxes from your school days. Anything I could do to personalize these school materials and put my own stamp on them, I did. In first grade, I went so far as to ask my mom to cover my pencil box in pretty wrapping paper so it would look different from everyone else’s on the planet. I guess that need to turn the boring, mass-produced product into my own creative masterpiece still lingers, because here I am as an adult teaching my own kids, and I’m still doing the same thing! I love it when we turn the boring cover of their binder or notebook into something they want to see every day.
When our oldest was getting ready to start kindergarten, my mom made a wonderful suggestion! She recommended getting journals for our kids that they could keep into adulthood, and these journals would be for recording the books they read. So I selected classic journals for them, and we have been keeping them ever since.