Book Trailer Tuesdays and First Chapter Fridays

Back in elementary I was a read aloud queen! We read so many books every year though novel studies and mentor sentences. Jumping up to middle school and into a period schedule, there hasn't been time to complete as many, but I still have the passion to expose kids to books to get them reading. The only issue was that I was used to elementary books, but not middle school books.

Enter First Chapter Fridays!

During that first year I found Amanda Zieba's YouTube channel with tons of recommended books. It became the highlight of Fridays being able to show off books that had been vetted by Amanda and have her read the first chapter to the kids. She knows middle school. I quickly found while teaching multiple classes the power behind technology - if I could save my voice and not read aloud my times, the kids didn't mind.

My second year I also found out about Book Trailer Tuesdays from Abby from Write on with Miss G over on Instagram. She also had a list of books that she recommends, she even has links to the best ones. Book Trailers are similar to movie trailers - a visual of what the book is about - usually 1-3 minutes long. The graphics grab kids' attention. I searched Youtube for "________book trailer". There are a lot of creative people out there that have done a great job making book trailers. 

My issue was keeping track of all the books while sharing 2 per week...it became a lot! I was writing them down in my lesson planner, I was putting the links over on a channel on our Microsoft Teams, which worked as a running list that kids could listen to again during silent reading, but it wasn't much of a visual for the kids to remember.

Last summer I was reminded that back in elementary I took the books we read and created a bulletin board display, so I decided to do the same thing with our book recommendations. I took the big list of books that teachers had been recommending to me, and searched for their book cover image, put it into a powerpoint - 8 per page (about 2in x 3in), and then printed and laminated them. 

Last year it was so easy! I just picked one book cover for Tuesday and another for Friday. I stuck them on two small pocket charts near my class library so kids could have the visual. It worked well and did give them ideas of what they may be interested in. 

Okay - here are the books from the multiple lists. If there are less than 8 per page it's because silly me had duplicates. If you want my images to print, just drag and save them to your desktop. On my desktop I just needed to print the images at 200% to make it be near the correct size. 

I have not vetted all of these myself yet since there are sooo many of them. All are considered middle school, and some are considered YA - and definitely for more mature audiences. This past year I didn't use those, even though my 8ths are so close to high school. Some books our librarian recommended. Some are from Amanda and others are from Abby. All in all, the kids learned about some great books and I'm going to keep this routine in the coming years.

Hope this helps.