If You Want to Get Your Students Hooked on Reading, Teach This!

I am excited about today’s episode. Oh my goodness. Today, we are going to talk all about genre reading genres.

Now, this is one of my favorite topics, because I think I realized sort of midway through my teaching career that I was doing a pretty poor job of teaching my students about genre, and I didn’t realize how important it was. And I know that we can all agree that reading aloud to our students is probably one of the most beneficial things we can do for them.

And I know like I always made it a priority to read aloud to my students. In fact, a couple episodes back, I talked about all of the different ways that you can find more time to read aloud to your students during your instructional day. And even from my first year of teaching, I tried to find ways to read aloud to my students just for fun.

But here’s the catch. A lot of times I was reading aloud to my students from the same genre. And we were in a bit of a reading rut, and I guess I didn’t even realize it. And it wasn’t until I was teaching a few years kind of into my career. And I sort of just like realized or noticed that pretty much every single read aloud whether it was a picture book or a chapter book, it was fiction, and it was realistic fiction.

And as a reader myself, realistic fiction is probably my favorite genre to read. I really like reading about characters that I can relate to I really like reading about events that could possibly happen. And I like reading about sort of this imaginary made up story, but being able to visualize what it could look like in real life. And I know that I don’t like reading historical fiction, I know that I don’t like reading informational texts. And while I read fairy tales as a kid, and fables and traditional literature, and all of that stuff, and poetry and whatnot, I don’t love that as an adult.

And I started to realize that the way I chose texts for my students was merely a reflection of the books that I enjoyed reading myself. And I kind of had this moment of clarity at some point. I don’t know if it was year four or five in my career, but I started to realize that just because I enjoy reading realistic fiction so much, doesn’t mean that all of my students will enjoy reading realistic fiction so much.

In fact, I had a student one year that was obsessed with reading historical fiction, and I was like, Oh, my goodness, we’re gonna have a hard time because I know that I need to nurture his love of historical fiction, but I really just don’t like it. Same thing. One year, I had a student who loved informational texts, like he loved learning new things, and he loved text features and all of those things. And that is not my preference.

But I realized that it is my responsibility as a teacher, that if I want my students to someday have a favorite genre of their own, like I have, and to be able to articulate what it is they like about certain genres, that I really needed to be a lot more intentional about introducing and exposing students to a wide range of genres that went beyond realistic fiction.

And once I made this realization and sort of this commitment to teaching genre, I maybe went a little bit crazy and kind of became obsessed with all things genre. But it’s because I quickly realized that it really is one of the best and most effective tools that we can use to get our kids hooked on reading, because it helps them identify and understand. And it just gives them almost like a framework for being able to select and identify books and know what to expect and all of these great things that we’re going to talk about today.

But genre is so important to teach your students. So if you are not intentionally focusing on genre, hopefully by the end of today’s podcast episode, you will understand why it’s so important and you’ll also have some ideas on how you can incorporate genre a little bit more during your reading block.

And I really think first and foremost, the reason why we need to focus on genre is that it helps students identify their reading preferences. When students know and understand the attributes of the different genres, then they are going to be able to quickly identify the types of books they enjoy reading.

And again, think about your own personal reading life. Like I’ve mentioned before, I dislike historical fiction. And so If I am choosing a book for myself, and I want to have a positive reading experience, I’m going to avoid historical fiction books because I know I’m going to pick them up, I know I’m going to read about 50 pages, and I’m going to get bored. And instead, I’m going to look for something realistic fiction or industry or something else.

But because I know my reading preferences, it makes it easier for me to actually engage and enjoy reading books that I know I will finish all the way to the end. And we want the same thing for our students.

But in addition to the whole sort of, it helps them identify their reading preferences, it also really helps out a lot with comprehension. And the reason why genre helps with comprehension is because each genre has different attributes and characteristics that are unique to that genre. And the more our students know, and understand those attributes, the easier it is going to be for them to understand what it is they’re reading.

It’s kind of like we’re giving them a roadmap for the reading. If they are reading historical fiction, then they know that they’re going to pay attention to dates and locations. And they’re going to think about what they already know about that time period. And events that happened in real life and look for those clues. And their understanding of that time period in real life is going to help them understand this historical fiction books so much more.

If students are reading a mystery, then they know that they’re going to be looking for clues they’re going to be looking for foreshadowing, they’re going to try to solve the mystery before the characters in the story dies.

If they’re reading science fiction, then they understand that the author is going to probably include names or a language that is completely made up. And that is going to maybe take place in a future time, and maybe in a location that they can’t comprehend. But they’re going to be able to tap into their visualizing skills and use context clues to help them figure out these unknown terms that might show up in the text.

And so the more our students know about the individual genres, the better equipped they’re going to be to read, to understand and then possibly enjoy any text that they read.

So if you have never made it a point to intentionally focus on genre, during the school year, and actually teach your students the different types of genres and focus on the attributes, and the text structures, and the author’s purpose for each one, I really would encourage you to make that a high priority for your classes next year.

And to help you do so I have five tips that I’m going to share with you today. For teachers who want to be more intentional about teaching genre.

First and foremost, use your read aloud time to intentionally introduce your students to a wide range of genres. And like I just shared, I had this realization that I used my read aloud times to share books that I enjoyed reading.

And as fun as it is for teachers to read books to our students that we love. And maybe books that we loved as a kid or books that we really resonated with, we really need to make sure that we are reading our students books that are going to resonate with them, which means you might need to use your read aloud time to read an informational text and teach students the value of reading text features and learning new information.

That means you might need to use your read aloud time to read a graphic novel. I mean, when was the last time that you read a graphic novel to your students? Maybe you need to use your read aloud time to read fantasy or to read a humorous book. And I know sometimes the humorous books can be so cheesy and can be painful for teachers to read, but our students love them.

And so you kind of have to put aside your own personal reading preferences and be willing to read books that your students will enjoy, even if you don’t.

A couple of things that you can do to do this is first of all, you could do a genre challenge at the start of the year and commit to reading every single genre as the year begins. And this is just a great way to casually introduce and expose your students to the genres all throughout the year.

Other things that you could do is you could have a genre of the month focused. And so rather than trying to read all of the genres up front, at the start of the year, you could maybe pick a genre or two every month, and then you’re going to be intentional about selecting texts in that genre. So that way, you know, at least by the end of the entire school year, you will have explicitly taught each specific genre and read books from the genre to your students.

And then another thing that I suggest teachers to do is keeping a genre tracker. And this literally could just be a spreadsheet, you could make it an anchor chart so your whole class could see it. It could be a checklist, it could be a piece of notebook paper that you keep on a clipboard next to your read aloud here. But really all you need to be doing is keeping track somewhere of the types of books you’re reading aloud your students and the genre that they are.

And the benefit of doing this and even if you want to turn this into a visual tracker, you could also use it as a graphing activity, but it’s going to help you visually see you know what types of books you’re reading frequently and even when was the last time you read something in the traditional literature genre. When was the last time you read a legend or a myth to your students? You know, when was the last time you read an autobiography or a memoir to your students or when was the last time you read poetry outside of the month of April?

If you are intentional about keeping tracks of the genres that you read, then more than likely, you are going to expose your students to a wide range of genres during your read aloud time, which can be one of the most powerful ways to teach genre to your students is just by example, and exposing them to it and having the conversations as you’re reading these books out loud. That’s tip number one.

The next thing is you want to make sure that you provide your students with the tools to help them understand each genre. And so if you’re going to be intentional about reading a variety of genres, then you also want to make sure that you’re being intentional about explicitly teaching your students each different genre.

Because it’s one thing if you read them all of the genres, but if they aren’t really tuning in to the unique attributes and characteristics of each one and understanding how to comprehend you know, the way we read an informational text is very different than a way we read a fairy tale or a poem or something like that. And so we want to explicitly teach our students how to read the genres, what the attributes are.

And a couple things that I like to do is even if you read the genre during the read aloud, that also takes some time, either after or before or during, to identify some of the attributes and characteristics that make that genre unique.

And I like to use anchor charts for a couple of reasons. One, they’re a great visual, but also you can then give students a copy of that same anchor chart that they can glue in their journal. So that way they can come back to it.

And just this idea that just because we teach our students something once and we introduce it to them, doesn’t mean that they have mastered it. So just because you have one conversation about, let’s say, traditional literature, that does not necessarily mean that your students are going to remember and know all of the characteristics and attributes of the different types of traditional literature.

And so it’s important that they can come back to reference material. So whether you give them anchor charts to put in their journal, or you have a word wall set up by your library, or even just a poster of you know, every time you read a lot of books, you put the picture of the book cover, and what the genre is, and some of the attributes of that genre. Whatever it is that you want to do, you just want to make sure that you give students the tools to help them understand the genres that they’re reading.

And in addition to anchor charts, and word wall cards, a couple other things that I like to give students are genre specific question stems, as well as genre specific graphic organizers. And this is important for students independent reading response.

So if you are using the workshop model, and you’re having your students read independently, more than likely you are giving them some sort of response assignment, whether it is you know, they have to choose if it is left up to them, or you give them a choice board of written response or a set of questions to answer or graphic organizers connected to your mini lesson, whatever it is, more than likely, they have something to complete that goes along with their reading.

And here’s the thing that you kind of need to be aware of. If you are teaching your students, let’s say about fiction skills, and you are asking them to analyze character traits. Well, if they are reading an informational text, more than likely their book does not have character traits. And if your reading response assignment is aligned to your mini lesson, if a student is choosing to read an independent text that is informational, they’re gonna have a hard time completing that assignment.

So I always like to make available to my students, and they can choose that. And if they’re not able to apply the skill that we did in the in the mini lesson, then they can choose kind of like the genre option. But I always like to give them questions stems that are specific for each genre, because what we ask ourselves while we’re reading a mystery is going to be different than what we ask ourselves when reading a biography.

And then same thing with graphic organizers. The way we organize our thinking is going to determine on the text structure which is going to be dependent upon the genre. So giving your students genre specific tools, like I said, such as anchor charts, question terms, and graphic organizers are really going to help them hone in on the attributes and characteristics of each text and really give them the the tools to equip them to understand those texts when they’re reading them independently.

Okay, so my third tip, and another thing I love doing is incorporating genre studies into your reading block. And a genre study is super easy, and exactly what it sounds like, you’re going to pick a genre, and then you’re going to let your students study it by reading multiple books in that genre over the course of a couple of weeks.

And you could do this with your whole group read alouds. And this could be a really great thing to do if you choose to do like a genre of the month, you could do a genre study every month. Or you can even do genre studies as part of like your book club routine, and students could choose which genre they want to study. And they can even choose every month to study a different genre.

You can even let the students do a genre study independently. It doesn’t even need to be something that they do as a group, you could have it be as an extension activity or something that you encourage them to do at home with their family.

And there are really just four steps to a genre study. Like I said, it’s super simple. First of all you want to explain, you want students to be able to explain what they already know about the genre. We want them to be able to define it. So they need to have a basic definition of that genre. And they need to be able to share some of the basic attributes that they know of.

So once they at least know all of the books I’m reading are going to be historical fiction, I understand that historical fiction is a made up story. But it takes place in a real time period, you know, so some of the dates might be accurate, some of the events that happen, you know, are going to be accurate, and maybe some of the places they talk about but the character, and what happens to the character that’s going to be made up, you know, so they have to have a very basic understanding of it.

And then you want them to explore the genre. So you want to give students maybe four to five different titles of books that they can read. And it’s great if you can give them more than that, because then they can choose, and choice is powerful, but they can choose which books they want to explore.

And the whole goal of this space is for students to deepen their understanding of the genre through exploration. So this is really a great inquiry based approach to teaching genre. So they’re just reading and they’re exploring, they’re comparing and contrasting and looking for similarities. They’re asking questions. They’re questioning their definition of it, they’re trying to see do these attributes exist in all of the books? Do we notice some attributes that exist in some of the books?

And then once they have explored the titles, then we want them to elaborate. So we want them to go back to what their original definition was and we really want them to expand on them.

And so things that they could do is they could say things like, we noticed that historical fiction books always. And this is where they put the attributes that always exist in a historical fiction book. And then they could do something like we noticed that historical fiction books, rarely. So what are some things that you aren’t going to see in historical fiction?

And then maybe even something like the usually the author’s purpose of historical fiction is to and then kind of figure out why do authors even write, you know, historical fiction books? And they can just continue to kind of like, elaborate on their definition, identify attributes that they always see rarely see, you know, make connections, what they noticed.

And then the last step of the genre study is for them to evaluate. We want students to be able to share their opinion on that genre, we want students to have a voice an opinion, a, you know, how they feel about it, how they enjoyed reading it, how they think the author did when it came to writing it.

If this is categorized as a historical fiction book, did the author really incorporate all of the attributes of historical fiction? Or did they kind of blend two of the genres together? We want students to think would they recommend this text to a classmate? Anytime students can evaluate a text or a reading experience, they’re going to be making it personal, they’re gonna be putting their personal spin on it, they get to have a voice. And this evaluation phase really helps students develop their reading identities.

If you want to be intentional about teaching genre, try to do a genre study and do one and if it goes, well do another one. And if it doesn’t go, well figure out what didn’t go well and make some tweaks and changes and then just continue to try to bring these into your classroom.

And then another tip is to make reading genres fun for your students. I think sometimes the idea of fun, gets a bad rap in classrooms. And we maybe think that if our kids are having fun than they aren’t learning, or if it’s going to be fun, then we have to be dressed up. And there has to be decorations, and a party and all of these extra things.

But I really think that we want our students to be having fun, because if kids are having fun, then that means that they are engaged. And if they are engaged, then they are working, they are thinking they are involved in something, and if it’s connected to reading, then they are going to be working on becoming lifelong readers, which is ultimately what we want. So be intentional about making reading genres fun.

And some of my favorite ways to do that you guys have heard me talk about reading challenges in the past, but you could do a genre challenge. And this can happen really at any point during the year. But you could have your students, you know, you could do one for a week, you could do on for a month, but you could have them, you know, list out what are the 20 different genres that I want to read, and then see if they can read a book from 20 different genres throughout the course of a week or a month.

You could do this as for your read alouds. Or it could be an individual challenge. You could also do a genre tournament. This is a really fun thing to do during like March Madness really could do it anytime. But it works well when you know, basketball brackets are happening. But you could do a genre tournament and you could kind of even think about breaking up your bracket into fictional on one side nonfiction, maybe poetry on the other side. And then you could just have them compare two different books.

So you could you know, have them compare fantasy to science fiction, if you read an example of each, which one do they prefer? Whichever one wins, advances the bracket if they’re reading, you know, fables or folktales, which one do they prefer whichever one would wins, advances, and then you just set up a bracket.

And then every time you read two sets of books, they just decide their favorite genre. And then as a class, you kind of come up with which genre your class enjoys reading the most. So can be really fun, simple way just to make them a little more fun.

Now another thing you can do that is super simple, is you could do guess my genre, every time you sit down to do a read aloud. And all this is it’s kind of like name that tune. So try to get your students to see how many hints do they need before they could guess the genre of the book.

And, of course, your students are going to try to say Oh, I can guess it in one in one hint. And so then of course, you’re going to give them the number of hints that they say and just see how many clues does it take for students to guess the genre.

And this is great because it is going to really help students kind of like, narrow down and focus on what attributes are unique to that specific genre. And which attributes kind of overlap. Because some attributes are going to be the same across multiple genres, you know, a lot of genres that are fictional, or they’re going to have characters, they’re going to have settings, they’re going to have, you know, story events, but that’s going to look different in historical fiction or Science Fiction.

And so helping them realize that some genres have similar attributes. But ultimately, there are unique characteristics for every genre. And if you play guess my genre, and then that’s just going to be a great way to have a daily conversation. And in a game format, that helps students figure out the genre of a book before you read it.

Could also do genre focused book talks where you know, if you’re doing a genre of the month, you could say, this month, I want students to give book talks on biographies, or we’re going to do traditional literature book talks this month. And just make it fun for students to explore other genres. There are tons of ways that you can make it fun. But these are some really simple ways that you can just make teaching genre a little more fun and exciting for your students.

And then my last tip on how to sort of focus and being intentional about incorporating genre into your reading block, is to make sure that you validate your students reading experiences no matter what they are. And, really, this might be the most important tip that I share with you today.

Because no matter what genre your students choose to read, you need to validate their preference, because that helps them see themselves as a reader. And that helps them realize that what I like to read is important.

And I remember I had a student one year that only read Minecraft books like seriously, that is all he read. And it drove me nuts, because he would read the same five to six books the entire year, when our Scholastic Book Fair showed up, he bought more Minecraft books. And that is all he read. And he just reread them over and over again.

And he really refused to read any other books. But the thing is, he loved reading them. When I asked him to sit down for independent reading, he immediately sat down and started reading. And he would always come up to me and say, Oh, my gosh, I just read this one thing, and I went home, and I tried it on my Minecraft stuff. And I don’t really understand Minecraft, but I’ve enjoyed listening to him.

But he was so into reading Minecraft, and he was learning from it. And he was applying what he read. And he had a positive reading experience. And I always think about what would have happened, if I would have told him, You know what, you have to stop reading Minecraft, and you need to read something else instead.

That probably would have been soul crushing for him. And he probably would have read something else because he was a relatively compliant child. And he probably would have read, you know, some informational historical fiction books, but it would have been fake reading, and he wouldn’t have enjoyed it. And he wouldn’t have been able to become passionate about this subject.

And so it’s important that even if we don’t enjoy our students reading experience in the same way, even if we think they should read other books, we still need to make sure that at the end of the day, they have their own preferences. And if we want them to become lifelong readers and lovers of books, then we need to validate what they enjoy reading, even if it means they are reading the same books over and over again.

Now, of course, our hope is that if we expose them to new genres and make it exciting, and make it fun that they’ll want to try other things. But at the end of the day, it is more important for your kids to love reading. Even if it is only one genre or one set of books or one series. That validation is going to go with them a long way.

So I will talk to you guys soon.