Kellee’s Book Choices for her UCF Children’s Literature Course

I am so lucky to have the opportunity to teach Children’s Literature this year at the University of Central Florida. To have the opportunity to work with future teachers are they determine their point of view as an educator is such an awesome experience. I am so glad to be part of their journey!

My favorite part of prepping this course was choosing what books I was going to include. Since I couldn’t choose just one or even a handful, I decided to follow Ricki’s advice and went with book clubs, and I really liked how it worked out.

The course is set up around a textbook that teaches by genres, so the book clubs followed the genres as they were introduced in the textbook. At each book club, students discussed their books then created teaching guides to share with each other, so by the end of the semester, students would have access to 45 different book guides filled with interdisciplinary opportunities, possible activities, and discussion questions.

Here are the books my students read:

Graphic Novels

Fantasy & Sci-Fi

Realistic Fiction

 

*The Length of a String is dual genres: both realistic and historical fiction

**We debated if Front Desk should have been in the historical fiction category instead of realistic fiction, and we came to the conclusion that it should have been, so I will move it in the future.

Historical Fiction

Nonfiction

And I threw in one short story anthology, too!

I’ve also loved exposing students to a variety of picture books both through read alouds weekly and through an illustration analysis activity. Here are the picture books my students have read with me:

     

So happy to be able to share these amazing books with my students!
Any thoughts on the books I shared?