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Reading Genres: Encouraging Students to Read Across the Genres

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As teachers, it is our job to encourage students to be reading genres outside their normal scope. People tend to gravitate toward what they like. This is true in most things in life. Think of going out to dinner at your favorite restaurant. If you’re anything like me you have one or two favorite meals that you typically order. This is often true of reading as well. Even as an adult, I have some genres that I prefer over others. I gravitate towards these genres and read them more often. I do make a point to branch out and read more than my favorites.

Why Teach Students to Choose Diversity in Reading Genres?

Reading genres: Text at the top says "The why" and the image shows a child perusing a text

Increase in Vocabulary

Encouraging students to choose different reading genres can lead to an increased vocabulary. Students will come across new and varied vocabulary in different types of books they read.

Encouraging & Motivating

Students who read varied genres may find something they love that they were not exposed to before. Going back to the restaurant comparison from the beginning of this post, you decide to try a new dish at a restaurant and realize you have been missing out by not having it for all this time, that is much like reading different genres.

Exposes Students to Different Text Structures

Different genres are written in different formats. Students who read poetry will be exposed to different text structures than when they read nonfiction texts. This exposure is important.

How Can You Encourage Students to Read Across Genres?

Book Reports

When I taught fourth grade I had my students complete monthly genre book reports. These were perfect for getting students to be reading genres that varied each month and working on time management. The projects were small, engaging, and often interactive.

Reading genres: Book report book share

The pictured book report is one of my favorites. I always saved this for our last book report in May or June. It is a Book Share Book Report and the perfect way for students to go off to summer with a ton of book recommendations from their peers.

Novel Studies and Literature Circles

Encouraging your students to be reading genres that vary during novel studies and literature circles is a great way to expose them in a safe space. If you’d like to save some time and check out already-made novel studies and literature circle materials you can check out what I have available in my TPT shop.

Read Alouds

Do you read aloud to your class? Reading aloud is fantastic for any age. It shows expression, aids with comprehension, and is just downright lovely to be read to. When you read a new book, identify the genre to your class. These are my favorite read-alouds for upper elementary.

Classroom Library

Having a classroom library that is set up by reading genres is a great way to help your students choose a variety of books. I easily set up my library by genre by purchasing colored dot labels. Each dot color corresponds with a genre.

Image shows colored dots on the spine of each book which represent different genres.

Next to my library, I have a legend so the students can see what each color dot means. I also like to have a reading genres display that allows students to easily access the definitions. This genre poster pack has 20 different posters for you to print and use.

Image shows a bulletin board with the heading "Literary Genres to Explore" and on the board are 8 different genre posters.

Genre Trackers

Another great way to encourage your students to read different genres is to give them a tracker. This visual will help them see what kinds of books they are reading. Grab two free trackers below!

2 Free Genre Trackers

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    My name is Jen and I’m the face behind Endeavors in Education.

    I have a passion for ELA and science. I am even STEM certified. Now I spend my time hanging with my kids, blogging (endeavorsined.com), and creating for my TpT store Endeavors in Education.

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