One of my favorite things about being a teacher librarian is dreaming up new ways to engage and inspire our readers as they connect to books, characters and series they love. It's the best when our readers develop special connections to characters, series and publishers of the books we have in our library and classrooms.
This happened last year in our 2nd grade classrooms when our teachers Staci Braun, Tracy Ferguson, Amanda Hetland and Megan Warwick started checking out several books in different early reader book series from our friends at Capstone. One day when I was in Amanda's room for a technology activity, her students told me how much they loved the Yasmin books and wondered if I had more. I was excited to see how the teachers and students were embracing the stories, characters and series.
At the end of the school year, they asked to get together so we could brainstorm how we could take this concept and grow it into a new book club idea for this school year. We thought it would be great to start with several of the kids favorites series like Yasmin, Sadiq, DC Super Heroes, Katie Woo, Pedro and more.
So, over the summer, I took that list and picked four titles from each series. I ordered five books of each of these titles from Capstone. You will find the New Capstone Book Sets for 2nd Grade Google Doc here.
Right now, these books are housed in the library as we wait for our brand new shelf that will go in the hallway down by the 2nd grade rooms.
It will be called Our 2nd Grade Capstone Book Club Pop-Up Library! It will be a place where our teachers can get sets of books from the different Capstone series to bring into their classroom to read in book clubs and for free reading.
To start the school year, the teachers have been sharing the different series and books to get their students familiar with the characters. They will start the actual Capstone Book Clubs soon.
To go along with the book clubs and to give our readers another place to connect to these characters and books, we also had the idea of using the Capstone Interactive eBooks we have to create Our Virtual Capstone Book Club Library!
For creating the choice board, I took a screen shot of each book cover and hyperlinked the link for the eBook to the cover as shown in the image above.
...displaying the print copies in their classrooms. I love how they are using them together.
I put together a poster for each choice board too. I used QR Code Monkey to make the QR code. With this free site, you can include a tiny screen shot which makes it easy to know what each QR code is for.
I laminated colored copies of the first 6 posters for each teacher to hang up in their classrooms.
And now for one of my favorite parts!
The teachers have also been making a black and white copy of each choice board. The students use these as a way to keep track of every book they are reading within the Capstone series.
As you can see, they are very proud of their reading achievements...
...and when I come into their classrooms, they can't wait to show me all of the books they have read. 
I love how the teachers have given them choice within this reading program.
This means the world to our readers. It truly shows.
Here are the choice boards that I have created so far. You can make a copy and add links to the eBooks you have too.
And a special choice board that includes all six of these choice boards. You will find this here to make a copy and changes of your own.
As the year goes on, I will continue to create choice boards around the Capstone characters that our 2nd graders are reading like Camila, Sofia Martinez, Katie Woo's Neighborhood, The Amazing Adventures of DC Super Pets, The Amazing Adventures of Batman and Superman, Emma Every Day, Astrid and Apollo, My Furry Foster Family, Far Out Fairy Tales, Mr. Kazarian, Alien Librarian and more.
In fact, this page on the Capstone site for Early Reader Books is the perfect place to start when taking on a project around your early reader program.
It outlines What Makes A Good Early Reader Book?,
How Can Early Readers Build Lifelong Readers? and so much more. You will find it here.
This is just the beginning of something that will make a special and important impact on our readers. It will bring a reading experience to every one of our students that they will never forget.
And my hope is that this will be the start of something wonderful that will spread to the other grade levels too. I can't wait to see what we do next with our Capstone Book Clubs!
In the next blog post, I will share how we are going to be using Biblionasium with this program so our students can make virtual book shelves, write reviews, recommend books and more.
