I loved teaching genre when I was in the classroom, and now I love talking about it. I view teaching genre as the cornerstone of a literacy block. Genre is something that you can talk about in both reading and writing, so anytime you talk about genre, it can have an impact on all areas of your literacy block. 

Genre categorizes books and texts by specific attributes. When students understand genre, it gives them a roadmap to help them navigate the texts they read. By learning genre, students gain tools and clues to comprehend different types of texts.

Teaching genre boosts academic performance, student engagement, and community building. It's a great topic to introduce at the start of the year. In this episode, I share three fun activities to introduce genre to your students.

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You're listening to episode number 214 of the Stellar Teacher Podcast.

Teaching literacy is tough, but with the right tools, you can be not only good, but great, amazing. I'm talking off the charts, impactful. Hey, I'm Sarah Marye, a literacy specialist with over a decade of experience working as a classroom teacher and school administrator. Tune in each week to this podcast to hear no fluff lesson ideas and strategies that will help you feel confident in your abilities to truly grow your students as readers. Are you ready? Let's dig in.

Hello, hello! Happy Monday. I am so excited for today's episode because we are going to be talking about one of my all time favorite reading topics. And if you've been listening to this podcast for a while, you might have a guess as to what it is. It is genre. I love talking about reading genres. I loved teaching about it too when I was in the classroom. And like I said, if you have listened to this podcast for a while or followed me on Instagram, then you know it's something that I talk about quite frequently, and I think it is so important, because genre is really one of those things that I think really helps our students fall in love with reading. And I know that as teachers, obviously, we want our students to be successful, and we want them to master the standards, and, you know, pass the test at the end of the year and experience academic success. But I think more than that, if you ask most reading teachers, they are going to say that they want their students to have a love of reading, that they want their students to fall in love with reading, that they want their students to become lifelong readers. It's that sort of motivation. I don't know. It's like we love reading books ourselves. We love reading to our students, and we want our students to have that same sort of love of reading and genre is definitely one of the things that can help you achieve that goal.

In today's episode, I am going to be sharing three ways that you can introduce genre to your students at the start of the year. And they are really fun and really engaging, and I hope that you will pick at least one of them to do with your students. So before I get into those three specific strategies. Let me just do a little bit of background knowledge on what genre is and why we need to teach it to our students.

So first of all, genre, that term, is simply a book or text category that is defined by a specific set of attributes. You know, obviously there is a difference between fictional texts, informational texts, traditional literature, poetry, and each of those different genres has a set of attributes or characteristics that we can use to describe those books. You kind of think of those big categories, really fiction, nonfiction, traditional literature and poetry. And then even within those bigger general categories, there's even smaller categories. So it's like within traditional literature, there's fables and folk tales and myths and legends, and each one of those genres has their own specific attributes. So genre is simply a way for us to categorize books and talk about books within a similar category by their attributes and elements. Now most of the time, teachers will at some point teach genre to some capacity in their classroom. When I first started teaching, back when I was like a second grade teacher, we would talk about genre based off of the comprehension skills we were teaching. So it's like when we were teaching about characters and setting and plot, obviously we're reading fiction and talk about how these are things that you see in fiction texts. And then when we're teaching things like nonfiction text features and main idea, those are things that would come up when we're teaching, you know, nonfiction informational texts. But beyond that, I didn't really go we did, obviously, a poetry unit too, but, like, we didn't really go in depth into genre. And a lot of times what happens is, when we teach genre, we only focus kind of on the major ones, fiction, nonfiction, poetry and sometimes traditional literature. I know that's a part of a lot of, like, third grade standards. So we sort of, you know, gloss over the major ones. And if we even go in depth, it's because we're teaching genre as, like an isolated unit. So it's possible that at the start of the year you do introduce all of the genres to your students, and maybe you show them, you know, anchor charts, and you talk about all of them and do you know, sorts and whatnot. But we don't necessarily go beyond that and let it carry through to the, you know, the rest of our year. And I feel like rarely do we talk about the academic benefits of understanding genre. I feel like more often than not, teachers talk about some of the personal benefits, or just more like, engagement, enjoyment benefits of genre, like it helps us figure out what we enjoy reading. But there are also academic benefits to having a strong understanding of genre. And so what we really want our genre instruction to look like is we want to make sure that we are intentionally introducing and teaching a wide number of genres, not just those big categories, but we want students to understand fantasy and science fiction and historical fiction and mystery and memoirs and autobiographies and biographies, and just all of the different small subcategories of each genre. And we also want to make sure that we are focusing on genre throughout the entire year and in all aspects of our literacy block. I always think about genre as being like the cornerstone of your literacy block, because genre is something that you can talk about in reading and writing. It covers both subjects, and so it's like, anytime you talk about genre, it can have an impact on all areas of your literacy block.

But I also think we want to make sure that one we are aware of the academic and engagement benefits of understanding genre, and that we highlight those to our students. And maybe you're thinking, well, what are the academic and engagement benefits of genre? I'm so glad you asked. I will share them with you. So I think one of the biggest academic benefits of genre is when students understand genre, it gives them a roadmap to help them understand the texts they read. We talk about this a lot with like nonfiction text structure and how understanding the organizational structure of a text helps students understand that specific text. Genre kind of works in the same way. You know, students can understand the attributes and the elements and the way genres are structured. They are given really a set of clues and a set of tools that are going to help them understand each individual genre that they read. So I think that is like the hugest academic benefit.

But there is also an engagement benefit. You know, when students know different genres, it empowers them to select the books they enjoy reading. If students have no idea that science fiction is a category, or, you know, scary stories exist, or poetry exists, and those are the types of books that they enjoy reading, they are going to be missing out on finding the books that they love. So there are engagement benefits to focusing on genre.

And then there's also, I think, a huge community benefit when you focus on genre. When you do genre based activities in your classroom, it is going to help you create a classroom community that loves reading. You know, I think most of the time when we bring genre into the conversation, it is in a fun and engaging way, and it gives your students a common language that you can use to discuss, analyze, evaluate texts, but, like I said, in a fun and enjoyable way. So I just, I don't know, I think genre is so important, and I love teaching it. I love talking about it. And there is a quote by James Patterson that I absolutely love, and he says, There is no such thing as a kid who hates reading. There are kids who love reading, and then there are kids who are reading the wrong books. And I think that that needs to be our mindset every time we start the school year, is that we want to do everything we can to help our students find the books they love reading. Because all kids love reading, some kids just maybe have not found the books that they enjoy reading the most. And so when you focus on genre, and if you make that sort of like a commitment this next year, that is going to be one way that you can help your students find the books they love reading.

Okay, so now that that is a little bit of a backstory on what genre is and why it is so important, I want to give you three ideas on how you can introduce genre at the start of the year. Now, one of the things that you can do before you do these activities, or when you're introducing these activities, is you want to make sure that your students kind of understand what genre is and kind of like how at the very beginning of the episode, I said it's a way that we can describe books and categorize books. More than likely, if you're a third, fourth or fifth grade teacher, your students will have at least some background knowledge and some understanding of genre. So you don't necessarily need it to do this huge lesson on exactly what it is, but you could ask them, you know, what do you know about genre? Or even talk about how books might be organized, like if they go into Barnes and Noble, I feel like most of the time bookstores books are organized by specific genres, or ask students about the types of books that they enjoy reading. So, you know, just have a springboard conversation about what genre is. And I think you can even talk about how your goal this year is to help students find the books that they love reading. And part of that is, is helping them understand the different genres. So before you do any one of these sort of activities, just make sure that your students understand, like what genre is. They don't have to know all of the individual genres or the specific attributes, but you do want them to have an understanding that genre is how we can describe different categories of books based off of a shared set of elements and attributes. That's sort of like the first thing that you want to do.

Now with the different activities that you can do. One activity is do a genre based picture book scoot. And I mentioned the idea of doing a picture book scoot back in the end of the school year as a way to like, keep kids focused on literacy up until the very last day. Well, this is also a great way to start your school year. And a picture book scoot in case you're like, well, what exactly is that? It takes a little bit of prep work for teachers, but you're going to find a picture book that represents all the different genres, and then you're going to place a picture book on each student's desk. So if you have you know, 20 students, you'd have 20 different genres. If you have 15 students, you would just pick 15 different genres. If you have a huge class and have like 27 students, then maybe you just pick, you know, 15 genres, and there's like two copies of each. Maybe students wouldn't go through all of them. But the idea is, is that every desk has a different picture book from a different genre. And you might want to make a little recording card where it's like, book number one, put the title, and then, you know, list out what the genre is. And then you're going to give students a recording sheet. This could be something very simple, as a piece of paper that is numbered, that they match the books with, or it has the book titles listed out. And then what you're going to do is you're going to have students scoot, and they are going to go from desk to desk to desk, and they are going to preview each picture book. Now, before you do this, you want to make sure that students understand, you know, how does how do they scoot. And you probably want to give them, if you've never done like a scoot with task cards or something before, you might want to practice it with your students, you know, show them the order in which they're moving. Explain to them that, you know, every minute or so, you're going to give them a signal word, and then they're going to move to the next desk. They're going to have about a minute or two minutes or 30 seconds, however long you want to give them to preview the book. And then when you say, you know, scoot or move, or whatever it is, they're going to go to the next one. You might want to have some music playing in the background, you know, you might want to practice moving a couple times, because really, you're going to be having all of your students move at the same time. It can be done, but you probably want to practice it first, you know, communicate expectations, things like that. So with this activity, though, you know, the thing that I think is so great is students aren't reading the entire book, they are simply previewing and really getting a sample of each different genre. It's like a book tasting for genres. And obviously, students aren't going to read the whole book, but what they're going to start to notice is they might gravitate more towards or get excited when they see a picture book that has a picture of a student and they're flipping through the pages and the student is experiencing real life problems, you know. Or maybe they get really excited when they see a book that is about a real life topic, and it includes facts and text features and details that help them learn about something. Or maybe they get really excited when they see a book that has a really unrealistic, far fetched storyline, you know, with like aliens or made up creatures or something. But by previewing and looking at a concrete example of each genre, they're gonna start to get a sense of what books excite them and that they might be interested in exploring this next year. So this is not about reading a book. This is really, not about, you know, really digging deep and understanding the specific attributes. This is literally giving them a sample and a preview of the different genres. So that way, from the beginning of the year, they can start to say, hey, you know what? I think I might really be interested in nonfiction books. When I go to the library, I'm going to start to look for more informational books or biographies, because I really like learning about real people, events and places, you know. And students might not realize that unless they're looking at a bunch of different genres in one sitting. So a picture book scoot specifically focusing on the genres can be just a really great way for students to preview books, and also just kind of get excited about the types of books that they want to explore this next year. Now keep in mind that this is not necessarily like a quick activity. This is not something that you can probably get done in like 30 minutes. You probably need at least 45 minutes, maybe even an hour, and so if you have kind of a squirrely group, you might want to break this up and do it over two or three different days where students are just rotating, you know, five or six desks at a time in order to keep them engaged and focused. So just pay attention to, sort of like, your student's response before you commit to doing the full activity. But I think also, because students are moving, it's quick. Even though it takes, well, for them to get through all of the genres, it goes pretty fast because there's a lot of movement involved.

Okay, the second idea for how you can introduce genre at the start of the year is to set up a genre gallery walk. Now, if you've never done a gallery walk in your classroom, this is a, you know, movement activity or structure that you can use for really, any subject. But what you're going to do is you're going to kind of think of your classroom as an art gallery, and you are going to create genre art that students can walk around and explore. And there are a ton of different ways that you can set this up. You can get chart paper, and you can create a genre poster for each of the genres that you want your students to study. You can get pre made genre posters. I know I have a set of anchor charts in my classroom that teachers literally can print and use, and they have the genre, they've got the attributes, they've got lists of books. So you could use a pre made poster. You could even find pictures of book covers that are of each specific genre, and just put the book cover on your wall with a little note that's like, this book is an example of an informational text, or this is an example of a folk tale, and give a little description of it. But basically, what you're going to do is you're going to do is you're going to create a Genre Gallery, and you're going to post these posters around your classroom, and you want to space them out far enough so that way they're not all bunched together. And then you want to give students maybe a genre reflection sheet, something where they can take notes, or a sticky note that they can possibly add to the genre art that's on your wall, the posters. And then you're going to let students walk around the room and learn about each genre by viewing the genre gallery. And then, of course, at the end, you're going to discuss and reflect. Now, like every activity that involves movement, you want to make sure that you explain the student's role and the purpose. And so you know before you do this activity, you might want to talk about if you if students have ever been to an art gallery before, and if students go to an art gallery, you know, what are they doing? They are walking. We talk about our behavior. So you're going to, you know, walk slowly, and it's going to be quiet, because we don't want to interrupt people's experience. And the art gallery, when you get to a piece of art, you're going to stop and you're going to study it, and you're going to look at it, and maybe you're asking some questions, and maybe if somebody is next to you, you're going to just whisper and talk about what you notice and what you observe. And then you're, after a while, you're going to move on to the next one, because you don't want to spend all of your time studying just one piece of art. You want to observe as many as you can. And so the same is going to be true in our genre gallery. We're going to study the posters. We're going to walk around, you know, if we notice there's a large group at one poster, we're going to go maybe to another one. We're going to ask questions. And it's a much more sort of like open ended feel to it. You could do this for like, 30 minutes, and you could tell students to try to, you know, observe all of the posters. Or you could say, find your five favorite that you're most excited in learning about. And it is really just like an open ended way for students to explore and learn about genre. Of course, at the end you want to discuss and reflect, because I feel like that is really where the power comes in. And this could also be, this is like one of those activities that is, could be good for, like, the start of the year, because it can be something that you can revisit throughout the entire week. So you could have this genre gallery set up in your classroom. Or this is even something that you could do with your grade level team and set it up in your hallway. And then you could, you know, have your classes take turns to go visit and observe the gallery. But you know, if you have it set up in your classroom for the first entire week, if students finish their work early, then you could say, great, go study a genre poster. And so it can be an ongoing thing, so it doesn't have to be done in one setting. And then alternatively, what you could do, if you don't want to necessarily create all of the genre posters or use pre made posters, what you could do is you could turn this into a collaborative project. And rather than you creating the posters, or using pre made posters, you could have your students work in groups, and they could create one genre poster. And so, you know, maybe they're going to be in a group of two or three, and they're going to become an expert on one genre, they're going to study it, they're going to find examples, they're going to learn about the attributes, and then they're going to create a poster, and then that's going to go up in the genre gallery, and then the students get to go around and observe all of the posters. And I think any time you're having students do a collaborative project, or if they're creating something that goes on display, you definitely want to talk about, okay, how do we create a poster for display? Talk about the size of text, the quality of the images, the neatness, you know, have them sketch it on a piece of paper first. But talk about, really, this idea of, we're creating a piece of art to go in the genre gallery, and so we want it to be of really high quality. So that is sort of an alternative way that you could do the genre gallery. This is also something that works great to introduce genres, but this could also be used as more of like an assessment in the middle of the year, or when you return from winter break, you could have your students create these genre posters. And you could do this activity at any point in the year, but it's just, it's fun. And like I said, the gallery walk is something that you could do with anything. It doesn't have to be just genre. We did them in my classroom all the time, and it's just a great way for students to get up. They're learning, they're asking questions, they're moving around, and just a super easy routine to incorporate. So that's another one you can do.

And then the third way that you can introduce the genre, or the third idea, is to do guess the genre. And again, this one requires a little bit of prep work for teachers, but what you can do is you can find short reading passages or just little excerpts. They don't even need to be like an entire passage, but just either a short passage or an excerpt that represent a variety of genres, and then students are going to read them either with a partner or small groups. I usually think that that works best at the start of the year. And then give students a list of genres that the texts could be, and then have them guess what the genre is of each passage, and then explain why they think that. And again, this is one of those activities that, because there's so many different genres, this could be done over several days or weeks. You could do even as a whole class, you could do one a day for the first two or three weeks of school. And if you do this at the start of the year, this activity can really serve as, like a pre assessment for what your students know about genre. Like I said, more than likely your students are going to know something. And if you give them a list of genres, you know, maybe they'll be like, oh yeah. I remember, we learned about traditional literature in third grade, but I don't quite remember, like, the attributes are specifically of it, or, you know, if they see the list, and then they're reading texts and they're like, I know we've assigned, you know, informational to one and biography to one. So they can sort of use the process of elimination as well. But this can just be a really fun way to, sort of like, have that conversation with students to say, Okay, what do you know about genre if we're reading this text, what genre would you assign to it? So this can be a really fun way, whether it's done partners, small group or even whole group at the start of the year. Plus, I don't know. It's kind of as like a game. It's a mystery. It's a mystery genre. Let's figure it out. So that's another way that you can introduce genre at the start of the year.

Now with all three of these activities, whether it is the picture book scoot or the genre gallery walk or guess the genre, the power of them and the impact in all of these activities is really going to come with the reflection and the discussion at the end. Because you can then start to let students talk about, you know, what did they learn? Which genres are they excited to explore? What genres aren't really their favorites? You know, they can hear other students why they like certain genres, why they're interested in exploring them. If students have any sort of like misconceptions, you can start to like figure out what genres do they feel most confident in identifying? Which ones might you need to like help them feel more confident in? So just make sure you plan for time at the end of these activities to have discussion as a class or in groups, so students can really reflect on what they discussed or what they learned during the activities.

Now these are just some ways that you can introduce a genre. There are tons of ways that you can introduce it. You can introduce genre and talk about it when you're introducing your classroom library. You could have a genre word wall up in your classroom and use that to introduce genre. You can give your students a genre based reading inventory. I have one that I absolutely love that we will link in the show notes, so definitely check it out. It's so fun to give to students at the start of the year, and it really helps them think about not the topics that they like to read about, necessarily, but it has them think through the types of reading experiences they want to have. Like, do they want to laugh? Do they want to, you know, have a mystery to solve? Do they like learning things? Do they like reading books with pictures or with words? So it has them think more about like, the reading experience and then names the genre that would match that experience. But even your back to school read alouds, you know, even if you don't do an explicit activity, like one of the three that I've shared today, even if, every time you read aloud, you start to introduce and talk about and discuss genre, you're bringing up that shared language with your students to help them, you know, just start to understand what genre is and how it can help them.

So hopefully you are getting excited about the idea of intentionally focusing on genre and incorporating some of these activities. And just to sort of circle back and remind you of some of the benefits, you know, if you make a commitment and just decide to make genre be a cornerstone of your literacy block this next year, then your students are going to get those academic benefits, and they're going to experience growth and success in reading, because ultimately, they're going to have the tools that are going to help them navigate, understand, comprehend every text they read, because they understand how genres are written and organized and put together. But also, your students are going to be able to identify and articulate their personal reading preferences, which I really think is, like, one of the biggest benefits of focusing on genre. And like, what a gift to give students that your students can say, Yes, I know exactly the books that I love reading, and I know the books that are kind of "eh", the ones that I don't particularly like, and I know to avoid them. But I think too, like having genre be a cornerstone of your literacy block, it helps your students feel like they are an active part of a community that loves reading, and it's just such an easy way to help your entire class community fall in love with reading. And I don't know about you, but I feel like all of those things, you know, they sound like things that I wanted my students to have as well.

So I hope that you are able to find at least one idea from this episode that is going to help you introduce genre to your students. And if you want to check out some of my favorite genre resources, then just go to stellarteacher.com/genre, and you're going to be able to see in my TPT store, like my genre anchor charts, my word wall cards. I've got passages that you could use for guess my genre. So if you're looking for just some new activities to add in to help with your genre instruction, definitely go check those out. Like I said, stellarteacher.com/genre. And I just hope that you and your students have so much fun this year discussing genre and making it, like I said, a cornerstone of your literacy block. So have a wonderful week. Enjoy talking about all things literacy, especially genre, and I will see you back here next Monday.

Thanks so much for tuning in to the Stellar Teacher Podcast. If you enjoyed today's episode and are finding value in this podcast, it would mean the world to me if you would follow along and leave a five star positive review. This helps me spread the word to more and more teachers just like you. And don't forget to join me over on Instagram @thestellarteachercompany. You can always find the links and resources from this episode in the show notes at stellarteacher.com I'll see you back here next week.