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1. Learn about your students' interests, life experiences, and challenges through observation and by engaging students in informal discussions, surveys, personal narrative and opinion writing assignments, and written and oral reader response activities. 2.Choose diverse realistic fiction read-aloud texts that are mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors for your students' interests, experiences, and challenges. 3.Model and teach students to create text-to-self and text-to-life connections (and disconnections) during and after read-alouds. 4.Teach students that as we can read and interpret books and written texts (words), we can read, or interpret, social situations. 5.Model and encourage book discussion and making connections to life during informal times of the school day as well as during the literacy block.