Van Poperin- Noticing Blog

I've found the kids in my kindergarten class really connecting to the class-made books my mentor teacher and I have started making with them.  We've made class-made books, "like real authors," where we each choose to write on a certain topic, what it means to us or a representation of it for us, and then we put them all together as a spiral bound notebook collection and keep them in a special bin in our classroom library.  As examples, we have made a "What Does 3 Look Like to Us?" book, a "I am" book, a "What Does 5 Look Like to Us?" and a "We're Going On A Bear Hunt" (where each of us wrote about where we were looking for a bear in our school).  I see the students really responding to them in our library center, they sit together and actually take their time leafing through, trying to read their classmates' pages, and getting very exciting when they come across their own pages.  I think this is a great and authentic way of getting students to interact with the content as well as encouraging them to build a community.