Walk into a Voyager or Pathfinder Humanities classroom any of these days and you will see one of four things:

1. Students engaged in small group or independent reading as they enjoy their book group books. All of our books tell stories with a focus on the LGBTQ community, as voted on by our classes.

• Princess, Princess Ever After by Katie O’Neill
• Drum Roll, Please by Lisa Jenn Bigelow
• The House You Pass on the Way by Jacqueline Woodson
• George by Alex Gino
• Star-Crossed by Barbara Dee

2. Students preparing their written work practicing their reading strategies. Right now we’re focusing on:

• Summarizing
• Asking questions
• Making Predictions
• Making Connections
• Close-reading and passage analysis

3. Students meeting in their groups to have a conversation about their book as they develop their speaking and listening skills. Students use their written work as the jumping off point for their group’s conversation.

4. Students busily building an annotated list of books we need to order as we work to promote the visibility of underrepresented groups and experiences in our classroom library. Each group has $60 to spend. Once our lists are built and our math is checked, we will actually be ordering the books!

We’re so excited to see what students choose to get for our classrooms!