As a one-on-one teacher, the best part of my job is getting to curate a list of book recommendations for my students based on their interests, reading levels, and books they’ve liked or disliked in the past. While my students will typically only read two or three of these books (the most a student has read with me in a year is five), providing these book lists for my students allows them to discover new books that are interesting and accessible to them, and nearly every one of my return students read a book (or two) from the recommendation list over their summer break.

The more I see the success of my curating abilities for these book lists, the more I want to improve on this skill and branch it out beyond my classroom. One thing I can do to work on this is reading more books to have a broader library to pick my recommendations from, which I am actively doing with five new books in my currently-reading list. But think it would also be fun to start writing short book recommendations/reviews for each of the books I read after I have finished with them. That way, I could give my students those thought out and detailed reviews for each of the books I’ve put on their recommendation list rather than just trying to explain the book to them in the moment, which is definitely my weakest point in this whole process.

With that in mind, I will be striving to write a book review once a week of something I have just read or a book I am currently teaching (which is sometimes both) and post it here. Another aspect of this whole book recommendation list is that I want to expand it out to other people in my life, not just my students, so being able to provide book reviews and recommendation lists to people that need a little help in that area would be super meaningful to me. The more I can help people incorporate more enjoyable reading into their lives to help establish themselves as life-long readers, the more I feel like I am doing my part to teach people the importance of literature and literary expression.

Stay tuned for my first book review: Fight Club.