Reading Online

During the month of April, my classroom has been finishing up our non-fiction unit and we have started our poetry unit. I always like to have an over abundance of texts available so students can emerse themselves in the particular genre we are studying. I have bins and bins of high interest topic books, I pull carts full of texts from the school library and I currently have 116 books checked out in my name from the Brighton District Library! What can I say, I love books! For these two units I have also provided links on my website (under my language arts tab) for students to try some online reading. I used free resources like Tumblebooks, ducksters.com, buzzle.com, gigglepoetry.com, poetry4kids.com and many more. I have allowed the kids to choose which type of text they want to read, and of course most of them want to read online using our new Chromebooks. I created a survey for them to fill out asking their opinions about online reading versus book reading and most kids said they liked online reading better. Some reasons they included were, "there are more topics to choose from", "I can't lose the page I left off on", and "it's more fun!". One special education student said, "I learned a lot more words as Tumblebooks were read to me and I could follow along!" I know that the implementation of this pilot is new and exciting for the kids and the novelty of it all could wear out after awhile. However, it has been great to give these students so much choice and options that seem endless. Having books and online texts available at any time of the day for the kids to go to has been ideal. I would never want books to be taken out of the picture completely. There is nothing better than a great book you can curl up on the couch with and get lost in. I see online reading as an extra bonus and a way to motivate students to take ownership in their literature choices.