Now I am not the biggest textbook teacher. I understand that textbooks have a lot of information that is valuable to teaching. Students also need to learn in upper elementary how textbooks are set up, where to find information, how to take notes from textbooks in order to be successful in middle school, high school, and definitely in college. Therefore, I do use textbooks some in my classroom to prepare my students for their future educational careers.
When I saw the condition of the 4th grade textbooks at the end of last year, I was in shock. Covers are partially ripped. A lot of them had pages falling out of the books. Some even have missing pages as I discovered this week when we started to use them. However awful they looked to me (and possibly my students), there was a lot of excitement in my classroom this week when I had the students get them out for the first time. I had intended to give the kids about five minutes to flip through the pages to see what they would be studying, but there were so many cool observations and conversations happening among my students that I let them have closer to 20 minutes to build up their excitement for the year. I guess it goes to prove that you shouldn't judge a book by its cover.
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