How can we choose the books for our futures students?

Hello everybody. Today my post is about how we can choose books for our future students. This is an important decision because to acquire a taste for reading it is necessary to read about what we really like and we, as teachers, should encourage our students to read, for the pleasure of reading.

I am going to explain you some criteria that we can use in order to choose the adequate book.

1^st Criterion: Age of the student.

We have to take into account the evolutionary stage in which the children are.

Depending on their age, kids like different topics, for example, they normally like stories where the main character is a child like themselves between five and seven years old, and with extraordinary events like superheroes or wizards.

2^nd Criterion: The length of the book.

This criterion is linked to the first one, because depending on the age and the ability to read of the child, he/she can read longer books.  We should keep in mind that the children have to be able to follow the story without missing the reading.

3^rd Criterion: The language.

The language has to be adequate for the students’ knowledge; the books can have words that they do not know, but not so complicated. The verbal structures should be known by the children, the book cannot have new structures because the children will not understand them. It is important to know that the presence of repeated structures, onomatopoeias and parallels structures catch the attention of kids because they can guess what  the next sentence is going to be and this makes kids feel secure. For example, in Snow White story they can guess what the Stepmother is going to say when she looks at herself in the mirror (“Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the loveliest lady in the land?”).

4^th Criterion: The structure.

The book has to have a lineal structure: presentation of the characters, the crux where the problems occur and an ending where the problem is solved. For example in the Three little pigs we can differentiate the three parts, first one presentation of the three pigs, the second one where they make their houses and the wolf destroys two of them and the last one where they can survive thanks to the brick house.

5^th Criterion: The topic.

It is important to know what children like. Depending on their interests we can catch their attention with different stories. We can find some books where the main character has some relation to the kids, thus we catch their attention.

I think that we have to bear in mind these five criteria to select the books for our future students, not only in English, we can use them in Spanish too. The most important thing is to read the book before the children do, because you have to know the characteristics of it, not only the students’ characteristics.