Margin Notes

As you are getting to know your students as readers and establishing a reading community within your classrooms, check out Jarrett Lerner’s artwork Kids Need Books of ALL Kinds (https://jarrettlerner.com/2018/12/11/kids-need-books-of-all-kinds/) and Grant Snider’s comic Books Are… (http://www.incidentalcomics.com/2018/06/books-are.html). These two graphics are sure to ignite many conversations around books, what they offer us, and why we need so many different kinds of them!

Here are three possibilities of how to use these in your classroom:

1. Students could respond to the images in their Writer’s Notebooks and then share their ideas to grow their thinking.
2. You could share how some of the different books you have read match up with some of the artwork and ask students to think about the same. This could be followed up with the questions:
   1. What did I learn about myself as a reader today?
   2. What did we learn about each other as readers?
3. You could use Kelly Gallagher’s Say-Mean-Matter Questions to guide students through their written or spoken conversations about the texts:
   1. What does the text say?
   2. What does the text mean?
   3. Why does the text matter?

If you use these in your classroom or have other ideas on how to share them with students, please comment below or tag us on social media!