The Virginia Reader’s Choice books provide a wonderful opportunity to encourage student exposure to quality literature. Each year, books are nominated and screened with the top 10 for each level presented to students for the final review. In this post, I’ll be featuring the book, Night in the City by Julie Downing as I share ways to use the book for specific reading skills and more.
Introducing my Reader’s Choice book, Night in the City:
Night in the City is a parallel story follows a child who is preparing to go to sleep at night including his routines before bed, his nighttime reading routine, sleeping, and then rising in the morning. In the other story, Downing describes the routines of night shift workers including how they gear up for work and get started as well as what each person’s job tasks as they perform their duties. The book provides a wonderful glimpse of varying careers and helps the reader learn to appreciate the contributions of night shift workers.
How Teachers Might Use This Reader’s Choice Title for Instruction:
Teachers can use the Virginia Reader’s Choice books in so many ways. I think you can use Night in the City by Julie Downing to engage students in literacy, social studies, and art. Here are some ideas to get you started.
1. Mentor Text Lessons for Reading
- Read Aloud Discussion
- What surprised you about life at night?
- How do these jobs help the city?
- What would happen if these workers weren’t there?
- See Question Task Cards within my unit
- Before, During, After Activities
- Schema Builder for Pre-reading
- Making Comparisons between Texts (Hello Moon)
- Note Taking
- Summarizing
- Questioning
2. Creative Writing and Research
- Descriptive Writing: Ask students to write about their own nighttime experiences or imagine what their city looks like at night.
- Writing from New Points of View: Have students choose a worker from the book to research and have them write a journal entry that includes information about the service their worker provides.
3. Exploring Community and Jobs
- The book highlights the people who work at night, such as bakers, firefighters, physicians, police officers, and street cleaners.
- Activity: Have students research different jobs that happen at night and create a class book or presentation about them. If you have Career Week, you might invite a night shift worker in to speak to your class. This book would be a wonderful mentor text on career education.
4. Science Connections
- Day and Night Discussion: Explore why some people work at night and how our bodies adjust to different sleep schedules.
- Light and Shadows: Use the book’s illustrations to discuss how light changes the appearance of a city at night.
5 Art Activities
Art integration is so important, and my friend, Amanda from Party in the Art Room, works very hard to promote art integration. Please check out her post on cityscapes here.
- Illustration Study: Downing’s layered watercolor art captures the glow and movement of nighttime scenes. Students can experiment with watercolors or pastels to create their own nighttime cityscapes. This would be especially fun when combined with their writing pieces. You might share this book with your art teacher for additional opportunities.
- Silhouette Art: Have students create a city skyline at night using black paper cutouts against a painted or colored background.
Interested in a unit for my Virginia Reader’s Choice book, Night in the City? Check out the listing below.
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$2.50
About the Virginia Reader’s Choice Project:
The mission of the VSLA’s Virginia Reader’s Choice project is to encourage young readers to become better acquainted with contemporary books with outstanding literary appeal, to broaden students’ awareness of literature as a life-long pleasure, to encourage reading aloud in classrooms as a means of introducing reading for pleasure, and to honor favorite books and their authors.
Once the book list is announced, students are encourage to read them on their own or listen to them through class readalouds. Once students have read/listened to a minimum of four of the 10 books, they are eligible to vote on their favorites. Teachers submit their voting records to the VSLA, and the winning books are announced for each level (Primary, Elementary, Middle School, and High School) at the end of the voting window.
This Year’s Virginia Reader’s Choice Picks:
Interested in more ways to use the Virginia Reader’s Choice Books?
I have joined with five other Virginia bloggers to help teachers implement the Virginia Reader’s Choice program with their students. Check out the activities and ideas on the rest of our sites.
