I try to teach direct lessons on book genres at the start of the year because it's just such a basic part of kids knowing about books and discovering what they like to read. My library is organized by genre, we discuss genre every time I read a book to them, we pack our book boxes with a mix of genres...so moving the study of genres to the start of the year just seems to make good sense. Plus it's fun for me to be all dramatic when I teach them how to say "genre".
I have a pretty eclectic mix of resources that I use when I'm explicitly teaching genres, but today I'm going to share a few that I found especially fun this time around. The first was actually something I put together a couple of years ago as part of my formal observation lesson. It worked really well during my observation and my kids begged to "play" it again. To introduce the genres, I created a four pictures-one word type activity to play together as a class. Considering it was the first time they were being exposed to the names of the genres, I used the slide that gave them a few letters in the right place to start. {I created three slides for each genre - one with just the spaces, one with a few letters filled in, and one that reveals the answer}
The cards are pretty versatile. If projecting them whole group doesn't float your boat, you can definitely print them for a literacy center or even an interactive bulletin board. I've just recently polished the set up enough to add to my tpt shop, so if you'd like to check this out to use with your class, you can see it here.
After we had a basic grasp on some genres, we went to town dissecting some Scholastic book order forms to find examples of them. They LOVED this. And I loved hearing all the discussion they were having about how or why particular books would best be suited to each category. It was during this activity they realized that sometimes a book kind of crosses the lines from one genre to another or has some elements of more than one genre. Learning this through their own discovery was much more meaningful than if I were to have told them. If you'd like the simple form I used for this activity, just click here to snag it from Dropbox. I also included a blank form so you can have your kids write in the genres they find if the ones I had listed don't work for you.
Another resource I love to use with my kids are these genre task cards. Kids read a little scenario about an imaginary book and they have to decide the most likely genre of the book. I love the versatility of task cards and most of the year these live on my Brain Builders wall, but we took them down and used them in small groups for this part of our study. You can find those in my tpt shop as well if they look interesting to you.
Happy Teaching, my friends. Until next time...
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