One of my goals as a teacher, and now as a school librarian, is to find ways for my students to share what we are doing in the library with their families.   I feel that home-school connections are extremely important, and any way that I can empower kids to share what’s happening at school will only help to build more positive relationships between our school and our community.

This year, I decided to create Book Talk Bookmarks as a quick and easy way to review the story we read together in the library, but also provide students with an easy way to share their experience with their families, thus building our home-school connections.

For those that follow me, you know I love using the Texas 2×2 books for lessons with kinder, 1st, and 2nd graders.  If you haven’t heard of the Texas 2×2 books, they are fabulous books that are geared towards kids from age 2 to 2nd grade. They generally cover a wide variety of styles, from Fiction and Non-Fiction, and some years even graphic novels.  If you would like to learn more about the Texas 2×2 books, click here.  I’ve done several activities already with the Texas 2×2 Books.  (You can read more about my “Battle of the Texas 2×2 Books here and also my “Journaling with the Texas 2×2 Books here”.)

Naturally, I decided to create Book Talk Bookmarks for these 20 books as well.  I plan to update these bookmarks every year as the new nominees are released in February.  

To help make these bookmarks useable for everyone, whether you’re a librarian, classroom teacher, or family member, I created two different versions.  One says “Today in the library we read the book…” and the other version says “Today we read the book…”

I know that there are many other excellent books out there, so I also created editable templates for both versions of the bookmark so that you can personalize it to fit your classroom and the books you are reading to create your own home-school connections.  All you have to do is add in the titles and authors of books that you read to your students and print!

If you’d like to start using these Book Talk bookmarks with your kids, you can get there here on my website or here at my TpT store. 

I hope you find these Book Talk bookmarks useful,  and are successful in building positive home-school connections with your families!  I’d love to hear other ideas you have for keeping families connected to what’s happening in your school!