Reading Graffiti

How many of you have read The Book Whisperer or Reading in the Wild?

I have read both and one of the things that I incorporated into my room last year OTHER than The 40 Book Challenge was to create a reading graffiti wall. If you don't know what this is, it's an area of the room where students can write their favorite quotes from the books they are reading. Here is one I found on the internet...

 

Last year, mine wasn't very successful. I had maybe six or seven quotes on it, and two of them were mine from our read alouds. Probably fortunately for you, I don't have a picture of it to show you, so you can't feel THAT bad for me. 

Needless to say, I still love the idea, and rather than throwing it out with all the trash I've been accumulating, I decided to try something a little different.

A really good friend of mine made me some of these last year...

With a piece of plywood and a jigsaw, really what CAN'T you do? #amiright

They are painted with whiteboard paint (that you can purchase from your local home improvement store...I'm pretty sure it's made by Rustoleum).  Last year I used a few of them on a bulletin board I created in the hallway outside my room, but they ended up being mostly decorations. 

SOOOOO....Why not combine the best of both worlds??

I started putting them up just to see how it looked and I liked it so much, I decided to do the whole door that way. 

Here is the whole door covered...

Then I thought to myself that it looked kind of plain so, see that marker hanging on the door? That's what I was originally using on the black paper. Now, I don't need it since the bubbles are dry erase, but that doesn't mean I can't use it in the meantime!!

I decided to spice it up a little bit!

I'm still not done yet. I think I'm going to back and add a little border or something. We'll see how it goes. Anyway, my intention is that hopefully the kids will WANT their quotes up there now, since there is limited space. The brilliance of dry erase is that if more kids have quotes, we can simply rewrite them a little bit smaller and make more room. Either way, this year it won't look so sad :(

How do you keep your kids invested in their reading?

Brianna