How to Host a Book Tasting in Your Classroom – Lesson Plans

With Read Across America Day coming up, it’s a great time to think about fun reading related activities to do in the classroom. Getting kids to read more and encouraging them to find new books to love is so important, and a book tasting is a fun and easy way to encourage kids to learn more about books they might not otherwise know about.

A book tasting can be done in a lot of different ways. My daughter’s class once did one where each group of kids read a “Who Was?” book and did a little report about it, so each table had biographical information about the person they learned about as well as the book they read.

You could have kids do “reports” on their favorite books, or have them choose a book from the library in a preferred genre that they haven’t read before to read and do a report on.

Or you can do genre tables and have kids (and/or the librarian if you don’t have a bunch of books in the classroom) bring in books they can then sort by genre and explore options they might not have heard of before.

Check out this post at Alyssa Teaches all about how to design a book tasting and how you can use it to teach kids how to determine if they’d like to read a book by scanning the cover, flipping through and reading a little. She also has printables you can use for your own book tasting.

[Photo: Alyssa Teaches.]