Wonderland Book Tasting

I did a Wonderland Book Tasting with one of our first grade teachers. I originally got the idea from Hope King and you can find her original blog post here. She has such amazing ideas! I had to do some tweaking since I was doing this activity with 1st graders. I spent some time brainstorming different ways the 1st graders could communicate with each other on whether or not they liked the book. That's when I came up with the Love It and Leave It cards as shown below. The students read the book with their partner for about 3 minutes. Remember we are just getting a taste of the book.  During this time the students are reading the words, looking at the pictures, and deciding whether or not the book is something they are interested in. They then discuss with their partner whether they LOVE the book or would rather LEAVE the book. However, the students cannot just simply say they love the book or would leave it. They have to explain WHY. This can be difficult for 1st graders at first because they have a hard time expressing their thoughts and feelings. However, after just a couple of rounds the 1st graders were improving in this area greatly. Having students justifying their thinking is vital at this age. If we teach our students at an early age to do this it will help them to develop into independent thinkers.

Download these cards for free here.

Here are some pictures from our book tasting. We had such a blast! I started this activity with the intention of just doing it with one class. It was such a hit we ended up doing it with 14 different classrooms! I was so thrilled so many teachers wanted their students to participate.

So how exactly did we choose our books? For first and second grade we did it by authors and the teachers decided on the authors. Below are some of the authors the teachers picked for their book tasting.

1st grade:

2nd Grade:

At the end of the book tasting many of the students were asking when they could go to the library to check out these books. We had such a great time and I am grateful I was able to do this with so many students! If you are wondering where you can get the cool hats, I bought them from Amazon. They are little pricey for paper hats, but I had about 280 students come through this book tasting and the hats are still in great shape!

A book tasting can be done with any age and they are super easy and fun to do. Anyone can do one, including an administrator! :)