Junie B., as she insists on being called, is an opinionated, lively, character in Barbara Park's series of books, and she is sure to delight primary students. In this unit, the teacher reads aloud selections from Junie B., First Grader (at last!). Students discuss the text with a partner and then individually compose sentences about key events from the story. Each student also creates and adds items to a mystery box, or a box that holds items or pictures referenced in the story. After students have listened to the entire story, they use their mystery boxes to retell the story to a classmate. As a culminating activity, students use the mystery boxes and the sentences they composed to make a related stapleless book about the story.

John Schumacher (aka Mr. Schu) is a blogger, a part-time lecturer at Rutgers University, and the Ambassador of School Libraries for Scholastic Book Fairs®. You could say every day is a giant book party for this teacher-librarian! In fact, Library Journal named him "The Xtreme Librarian" for the high level of exertion – along with some gears and stunts – he uses to get kids reading, and Instructor Magazinenamed him a Cool Teacher for redefining what it means to be a teacher-librarian.
This resource is a link to his Blog. The Blog hosts children's book trailers he has created. He explains "how" he created them.

A multi-age primary classroom teacher uses formative assessment as a barometer of student learning. She records anecdotal notes about her students' reading progress within an assessment notebook and references the notes for future instruction.