My Favorite Genre

Good Morning! I hope everyone is well and staying healthy. This has been a very hard and bittersweet time. I love having this new found time to explore and spend time with my family, but I truly miss my students. I have missed my home away from home: my classroom. It was my release from the hustle and bustle of home life. Well I can’t change any of that.

Another upside to having more time at home, is I have so much more time to read and this brings me to my post today. I have loved reading scary/horror stories since I was a kid. I grew up reading every single Goosebumps book published. I even had one that had three books in it and when you opened it it would scream. LOL can you imagine how mad my third grade teacher was when I brought that book to school. I can’t tell you how many looks she gave me and warning to take my book away. Lucky for me I was able to hook and unhook the screaming part of the book so while at school it didn’t disrupt the whole class unless I forgot before school to unhook the cover LOL. I even watched the show Goosebumps that would come on every Saturday Morning.I was in love and I still am.

I love reading scary stories to my students. I have found that some of them truly love them like me and some of them hate them but never want me to stop reading. I say it builds up their book tolerance and love too. Of course! Here are some books and authors I have been loving recently.

Full warning: you may want to read some of these books with the lights on or during the day. You would be amazed at what goes bump in the night. Especially when you’re reading a scary story.

After thinking about this post, as a teacher I could take this further and use it with my students. In fourth grade we write personal opinions. They learn how to develop an opinion about a topic they feel passion about and they support their opinion with personal experiences and stories. The best part is they really don’t have to research their topic. It all comes from what they think about the topic. Of course they have to prove why their opinion is true (so they can’t go too far off and make stuff up that isn’t true).

This personal opinion unit got me thinking of how I could combine reading and writing. I had my students write a personal opinion piece to convince their reader why their favorite genre was the best genre to read.