Reading aloud to kids is one of my most favorite things to do. This past week we read our 100th book of the year in my kindergarten classroom. Many of these books are put in the “Our Favorites” box, by request of the kids, to be reread many times. On a whim, I asked the kids what their 5 all time favorite books were for the year so far. They ran to the “Our Favorites” boxes and started pulling ALL the books out. I realized that question is just as hard for kids to answer as it is for me. My favorite book today may be different from my favorite book tomorrow. And just 5? Well, that quickly proved to be impossible. We had a fun time revisiting the books we’ve read since the beginning of the year and predicting how many books we would read by the end of the year. “A hundred million” was the most popular answer. Gotta love those kindergarteners – although I’m willing to take on that challenge! Here are just a few of our favorites so far this year. These are books that get the whole class yelling, “read it again!”, and the ones that have tattered covers out of love and frequent rereads. They are the ones that I hear lines from repeated over and over during play and throughout our day – “It’s all good!”, “Goodness, gracious me!”, “I’ll give you five bucks.”, “Can you believe this guy?” and “Aggle flabble!”. They are the books by authors that my students “stand upon the shoulders of” in our Writer’s Workshops – creating their own books about adventures of pigeons, Knuffle Bunny meets Power Rangers, animals that hop and hoot and many adventures of Pete the Cat. Hopefully you can discover a new one here that your class might enjoy or that a lucky kiddo will find wrapped under the Christmas tree. Enjoy!
Hattie and the Fox by Mem Fox
Knuffle Bunny series by Mo Willems
Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus (as well as the other “Pigeon” books in the series) by Mo Willems
Pete the Cat by Eric Litwin
I Want My Hat Back by Jon Klassen
Who Hoots? and Who Hops? by Katie Davis
Chalk by Bill Thomson
What are your class favorites this year? Please share!
Catching Readers Before They Fall 
Your kindergarteners have good taste. Those are a lot of my favorites too!
Thank you for solving my problem. I needed to order the Gail Gibbons Basketball book for my grandson and because I had just ordered the rest of the Fly Guy books for my classroom a couple of days ago- I was ready for some new suggestions so my next order would qualify for free shipping.
We “needed” the I Want My Hat Back and the Who Hoots and Who Hops.
We have the others and of course love them as well. I have done a Favorite Basket for well over a decade But…..now I have 3 or 4 thanks to the suggestions from the mentors I have found on their Websites. I started with Choice Literacy several years ago and I am so grateful because it opened the door for so many others. You know what is one of my favorite things. Going to the Amazon site with my little kindergarteners and first graders and having help me add our next treasures.
Thank You
Lani
Katie~
We enjoy many of the same books as your class! Each week we vote on our favorite book. It is too difficult to pick just one some weeks so we get a bonus vote! Recently we started a VoiceThread to share our favorites with others! Feel free to allow your kids to leave us a comment and visit as often as you like for new updates! http://voicethread.com/share/2394423/
~deb
As I do my usual Saturday morning house puttering and listening to NPR …
Scott Simon is reading Where Is My Hat?
How fun is that!!
Lani
I love this idea. This is my first year teaching First Grade and my kids have fallen in love with many books, but I haven’t kept them together or counted the many books we read. Thank you so much.
Kimberly
1st in Maine
Hi everyone,
I just was wondering if you had any thoughts..i have some first graders who are overreliant on soundng out each word, such as three letter words (s-a-t). Rather then saying it as one unit they are saying each phoneme sepeartely. Any thought? Any suggestions for activities to help them.
Thank you
Why is Blue Dog Blue is one of our favorites. We then do an art project with this book and our science color unit. Adding black and white to one color to get the lighter and darker shades of that one color. Always fun. We’re just finishing these up and you can probably see them in a few days on my class blog.
mrsvanmaarion.wordpress.com
Thank you!