Excerpt from Foundations - Classroom Library Setup

Your Classroom Library

You will, in most cases, not begin free-choice reading until later in the year. With students who have not done independent reading in previous years, you might not begin free-choice reading for several months, but you can begin working on your classroom library now.

Below, you will find some ideas for sources of reading material to provision your shelves.

The most personalized and comprehensible, and certainly the least expensive, way to build a class library is to collect the written versions of the stories you create with your students during the Shared Writing portion of the daily lesson framework, explained in detail later in this book.

Doing this quickly builds a collection of easy-reading texts that are very familiar, as students wrote them with you. You can include photos of the artists’ work alongside the text to support student comprehension, and/or have your students illustrate the texts.

Kaitlin Leppert with a collection of Write & Discuss.

Towards the end of the year, you can collect all of the stories that you have created over the course of the year in one book. It can be a fun project (that also happens to provide a lot of comprehensible input) to have students illustrate the stories for future classes to read.

To learn more or join Curriculum Club, visit ci-liftoff.teachable.com

Another free source of reading material is the texts from the end-of-the-year Story Book Project, described in End of Year Option 3. If you have upper-level classes, they could go ahead and start stocking your library with books to prepare for your first-year students’ free choice reading, which tends to begin in December, or January. If you want to enlist your advanced students’ help, you are advised to read the explanation of this project earlier in the term.

A book project

Here are some other sources of reading material, some free and some not.

Visit CI Liftoff's Teachers Pay Teachers store to download our Year of Free Curriculum in multiple languages, with multi-leveled FREE reading material aligned to IB text types, and useful to ALL teachers.

(1) E-Lit App (About $250) Full disclosure. I made this app. But it is, quite honestly, the most visually-scaffolded, compelling reading collection, especially for beginners, that I have ever seen. It is comprised of the types of leveled texts I wish had existed when I was teaching Reading Intervention. In my intervention classes, many of my students who needed reading material that was three to five grade levels below their chronological ages were bored stiff by the “baby books” that I could find for them. This app was a long time coming, and it is the fruit of many, many reading conferences with students who just cannot ever seem to find a text they like, because they have experienced such limited success with reading so far in their schooling. Supporting teachers to build a love of reading is the purpose in setting up this app. It’s been a lot of work, but when I hear back from students who are enjoying the texts, it’s worth it.

To learn more or purchase a subscription, please visit e-litapp.com

(2) Reading A to Z (About $120) This is a subscription that allows you to print short leveled readers (in French and Spanish) that go from A to Z. At first, I use levels A to D and put out higher levels as the year goes on.

(3) Comprehensible Periodicals (Prices vary from FREE to around $50 per term, on Teachers Pay Teachers) Mundo en Tus Manos by Martina Bex or Le Petit Journal Francophone by Cécile Lainé offer subscriptions to digital newsletters on current events, written for language learners. Martina Bex also produces a free literary magazine of student writing, Revista Literal, which you can print from her website.

Kaitlin Leppert with a copy of Revista Literal

(4) Class-Created Comics (Free) Making comics from previous stories and discussions is an excellent sub lesson plan, if your guest teacher does not speak your language. See the Appendices for a template.

(5) One-Page Wonders (Free) Jonathan Elliot, aka Profe Elote, has created a database of over 75 short nonfiction articles, in various languages, created by teachers to respond to their students’ interests. You can easily find his blog, by Googling “Profe Elote.”

(6) Scholastic magazines (About $80 for 10 subscriptions) Scholastic magazines are visually appealing and available in German, French, and Spanish. You can build up a nice collection of back issues over the years.

(7) Online Comic Library (Free) Mike Peto has assembled a printable library of student-created comics which you can find on his blog, by Googling his name and “comic library.” This example is by Brett Chonko.

Assembling a Varied Collection

My suggestion for how many texts to include in your collection, to begin free-choice reading, is to have at least three to five titles per student, so that everyone can have a good selection. So, if your largest class is 34 students, you will want at least 34 x 3, or 102 titles. These do not all need to cost you any funds. In fact, by following the suggestions above, you should be able to acquire quite a bit of reading material for the price of printing them and binding them in folders.

You will want to assemble material from the widest variety of sources as possible, about as many topics as possible. You will want a mix of genres: fiction, nonfiction, graphics, current events, poetry, etc. You will also want to offer high, medium, and low reading levels, to differentiate and provide your students with varying levels of challenge. You might also mix in culturally-authentic texts, such as children’s books, infographics, magazine articles, maps, menus, brochures, and other realia.

As you begin to provision your classroom with reading material, you will discover many sources of material created by teacher-authors writing short, leveled texts for language learners. Some are available for free download, and others are available for purchase. Among the growing selection of texts, created by proficiency-oriented language teachers, you are sure to find some titles that will delight and captivate you and your students.

To learn more, or register, visit wlproficiencyproject.com

A Note on Anti-Bias, Anti-Racist Reading

The texts that we place on our shelves speak volumes to our students about what we value, and so it is important to be intentional when developing your classroom library, and choose texts that communicate the values you want to uphold and uplift, and eliminate texts that communicate harmful, damaging, or erroneous messages. We want to be sure that our collections represent voices from diverse authors, about diverse characters, and that they portray these cultures, places, and people in a diversity of ways: positive, strong, joyful, committed, uplifting, inspiring, outraged, passionate…and, above all, real and human and true.

For this reason, I urge you to seek out, to the maximum extent possible, authors writing about their own lived experience, and not authors who are imagining how it would be to live a different person’s experience.

It bears special consideration to examine books written by authors about characters and groups whose identities they do not share. You will want to give a close eye to how “outsider authors” portray people and groups whose identities have been (and, in all likelihood, still are) negatively racialized and/or who have been harmed, marginalized, and/or exploited by the dominant culture.

This work is of high importance, as all students - no matter who they are, where they come from, whom they love, or how they identify themselves, benefit from the empathy that reading so readily develops. And, of course, it is absolutely critical that our students whose identities are too often missing or misrepresented in the dominant culture have more encounters with texts that reflect their identities back in a real, true, affirming way.

You are encouraged to check out the “Reading Diversity Lite” Checklist, available for free use and distribution from Learning for Justice (formerly Teaching Tolerance).

Another excellent resource is the Language Learner Literature Advisory Board, or LLLAB, whose mission, according to Esmeralda Mora, a Founding Director, is to “provide well rounded feedback to help you evaluate possible materials for your classroom library as it pertains to race, ethnicity, cultures, social class, gender, sexual orientation, gender expression, age, religion, family structure, neurodiversity, abilities, and experiences.” The board is composed of a group of diverse members who are well advanced in their fields, and whose personal and career backgrounds comprise experiences that enrich their work with a wide array of perspectives.

The LLAB can provide you with trustworthy information to help dismantle social inequalities by developing and curating culturally-sustaining reading material. They are committed to (un)learning and welcome feedback and suggestions for honoring and validating everyone’s identities, experiences, and realities.