Weekend Reading 4-21-12

Ok, I'm going to be honest. I wasn't reading as much as I wanted to be this week. I had a little craziness at work and family staying with me from out of state, so my reading list is a little bit sparse. I must say, however, that I have lots that I plan to be reading in the days ahead given the long list of fabulous bloggers participating in the Charity Preston's Five-Star Blog Challenge over at the Organized Classroom Blog. I'm participating as well because prior to this post, all of my posts have included original content. And given how little I've been able to read so far this week, this post may ultimately be original content as well. :)  If you're a teacher blogger and you haven't already investigated the Five-Star Blog Challenge, then you should definitely do so.

Books!

While I haven't been reading blogs as much as I wanted to this week, I've been chugging through a couple of books. I'm still reading How to Assess Higher Order Thinking Skills in Your Classroom, and I still think that it's got a lot of fantastic ideas, but I'm rarely a one-book-till-I'm-done kind of gal. There are just so many other amazing books out there that catch my attention, and then I find myself halfway through five different books until I force myself to finish.

The latest book to catch my eye is Raising the Standards through Chapter Books: The C.I.A. Approach by Sarah Collinge.

It was recommended to me by @annottmar on Twitter, and I love it. It's a new book, so it takes the Common Core standards into account, and it's written in such a teacher-friendly way. The C.I.A. approach stands for C - Collect Critical Information, I - Interpret the Text, and A - Apply the Text to Other Areas of Life. I'm only 38 pages into it so far, but I've really enjoyed everything that I've read. The first chapter was about implementing research-based classroom routines such as instructional read-alouds and building authentic practices. It had very practical suggestions on how to start these in the classroom, and the author included lots of pictures, charts, and directions about what materials to use for each step. I will definitely be referring to this book a lot as I get my classroom organized next year. 

And look what Amazon delivered to me yesterday...

A Lucy Calkins book about Common Core!!! I'm so excited to start reading this. I'm going to start training some of my colleagues on the ELA standards in a couple of weeks, so I will likely be a Common Core junkie for a while. 

I also picked up this book:

One of my colleagues recommended it to me as I was whining about how much my students are struggling with mechanics this year. I might give some of the ideas in this book a test run in these last few weeks of school.

Have you found any books lately that have inspired you? Please share in the comments section!

Happy reading!