 Welcome to the Ory County Schools Teacher Blog series. In this series, we will be spotlighting the work of some of our amazing teachers, and they will be sharing and reflecting on various lessons, tech tools, and teaching strategies. Join us for a peek into their classrooms. Hey guys! My name is Lauren Williams, and I am a fourth grade teacher at Aner Elementary, and this is my first blog! Vlog? Blog, vlog? Video blog, vlog! My goal for this vlog is for you to use some new books instead of those ones that are very repetitive and suck all the passion out of learning because you've done them year after year after year. I really want you guys to get back into the excitement of teaching reading and using new mentor texts, so I thought I would share some great ones that I've used in my classroom. Alright guys, so the first one that I want to share with you is one of my favorites, and it's about one of my favorite people in history. This is Counting on Catherine, which is written by Helene Becker. It is such a great book. I cannot stress this enough. I absolutely love learning about history, but doing it in a fun way in this book is great for that because it's one of those books that's on the edge between nonfiction and fiction because of the way that this story is told. The author does a great, great job of really sharing the story of Catherine Johnson and sharing her successes going through her life in sequential order. That's right. You heard it. Sequential order. Use that text structure standard, my friends. I really love how this book goes in sequential order and really focuses on those important events in Catherine Johnson's life that led her to her many successes with NASA and made her the fantastic mathematician that she was. I think it's a great book to motivate your mathematicians in your class to show them that loving math is a great way to become successful. Another great standard that you can use with Counting on Catherine is perspective. You can really use Counting on Catherine to teach perspective and showing Catherine Johnson's perspective on education. She truly believed education was so important and this is a great text to use to teach her perspective and show the students how to find examples of how and why she thought education was important. You can use Counting on Catherine to teach your central idea in supporting detail standard. It does a great job at laying out the importance of Catherine Johnson and all of her great accomplishments. The students will be able to find those supporting details that truly led to her being super successful. Lastly, one of my favorite things to do with this book is to pair it with an article about Catherine Johnson. What better way to have students really dig into information than taking one author's work and comparing it to another's. My students love to compare two texts when they talk about the same topic. This is a great book to pair with another text to talk about the differences in the ways the author talked about Catherine Johnson's successes. Is this one super factual? Yeah! But does this one hook us as readers and really entertain us between the story and the pictures? Absolutely! So I truly hope that you pick up Counting on Catherine to use in your classroom. The next book I want to talk about is Last Stop on Market Street written by Matt de la Pena. This is an absolutely great book to hit a bunch of literary standards in your classroom. My favorite part about Last Stop on Market Street is it's also a great book to use for that social-emotional learning piece. It's a great story about a boy who really doesn't realize the things that he's thankful for until he focuses on what's going around him on his bus ride with his grandmother. This is a great book to teach theme because students have an opportunity to pull many different themes from this text. One thing I love to do when it comes to finding the theme is playing Two Truths in a Lie. To find the themes, students will write two themes that can work for the text and one that doesn't work for the text and they're trying to trick their partners. It's a great opportunity to play a fun game but make learning a little bit more entertaining. Another thing that I love doing with this book is focusing in on the mood and what's awesome is the author and the illustrator truly work together to build the mood of this book. The pictures go so well with the mood as it changes throughout the story. Lastly, one more standard that we all love to teach is character development. Our character in the story truly makes big changes in this story. You can truly focus on the conflicts that your character is facing and how they make them change as a person. One thing that I love to do with this book and character development is to have students infer character traits just based on the pictures before even reading your story. It's great to watch them as you read, be able to confirm and modify their thinking. I truly hope that you pick up Last Stop on Market Street and give it a go in your classroom. Let me know how it works. Alright friends, that's the end of my first blog. Vlog. I really hope you enjoyed it and I truly hope that you take these two texts and use them in your classroom. If you do, let me know how it works because I can't wait to hear. Thank you so much for tuning in and hopefully there will be more coming. Thanks for watching an episode of our Ori County Schools Teacher Vlog series. Make sure to like, follow and subscribe to all of our dear Diss social media pages.