Top 10 book tasting ideas for the classroom
The ten, in order
- Set the tables like a café · ours. A cloth or a sheet of paper, a menu and a placemat at each seat: the kit prints all three. The room changing is what tells children this is not a normal lesson.
- One kind of book a table. Funny books at one table, true books at another, fairy tales at a third. A child who has only read one kind meets five more in an hour.
- Five minutes a book, then move. Long enough to read the first page or two and look at the pictures, short enough that nobody is stuck with a book they dislike. A bell or a song marks the change.
- Tick boxes, not sentences · ours. A tasting note a child ticks (yum, maybe, not for me) keeps the hour about reading. Writing a review of each book turns it back into a worksheet.
- Start with the cover and the first line. Ask each reader to guess from the cover what the book is about, then read the first line to see if they were right.
- Mix the levels on every table. Put an easy book and a stretch book of the same kind side by side, so every reader finds something on every table.
- Read the first page aloud at a table that is stuck. A grown-up's voice for one page often turns a 'not for me' into a 'maybe'.
- Pick one book to finish. At the end each child chooses one book from their ticks to read in full, so the tasting leads somewhere.
- Use it to start a book club · ours. The books children picked make a theme club where everyone reads a different book; the any-book club kit has the questions.
- Free stories when the shelves run short · ours. Peabody's free stories can fill a table on tablets or laptops when the library cannot lend six books of every kind.
How this list is made
Not a ranking: the order a tasting runs, from setting up the room to picking a book to finish. Peabody's own advice, from its book tasting kit.