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February 26 - March 10, 2022
Reflecting on her own lifelong obsession with reading, Quindlen writes in How Reading Changed My Life, “Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.”
The uninitiated might say that I am lost in my books, but I know I am more found than lost.
Yet time spent reading feeds more reading. The more my students read, and grow into a community of readers, the more they want to read. As we move into the year
Without spending increasingly longer periods of time reading, they won’t build endurance as readers, either. Students need time to read and time to be readers.
In The Power of Reading, his meta-analysis of research investigating independent reading over the past forty years, Stephen Krashen reveals that no single literacy activity has a more positive effect on students’ comprehension, vocabulary knowledge, spelling, writing ability, and overall academic achievement than free voluntary reading.
Students like Kelsey who have failed the state assessments pass them after a year of heavy reading.
What are the effects of intensive reading? Better writing, richer vocabularies, and increased background knowledge in social studies and science are natural outgrowths of all of the reading my students do.
Because reading has more impact on students’ achievement than any other activity in school, setting aside time for reading must be the first activity we teachers write on our lesson plans, not the last.
It is said that we make time for what we value, and if we value reading, we must make time for it.
Resolve to edge in a little reading every day, if it is but a single sentence. If you gain fifteen minutes a day, it will make itself felt at the end of the year. —Horace Mann
Maintaining control of a classroom when I am distracted by interruptions requires that my expectations for students’ behavior be clear so that my students know what to do.
During the early weeks of school, my students practice getting out their books when there are classroom interruptions. I start by prompting students to read when we are interrupted, but as the year progresses, students internalize this procedure, first as a habit, but eventually as a desire to steal more reading time. Their books call to them all of the time now, too, you see.
Endless time is lost during a school year in waiting for assemblies, riding buses, and standing in lines. I have commandeered this unstructured time for my students to read, and as a result, misbehavior at such times is almost nonexistent and my students rack up substantial reading time that they formerly spent talking, getting into trouble, or standing around being bored
By setting the expectation that reading is what we do, always, everywhere, it becomes the heart of a class’s culture. Even the most resistant readers can’t fight it if all of their friends comply.
If library visits are focused on choosing books and stealing time to read, there is no need to bark at students to find a book or shush them. Students rise to the level of their teacher’s expectations, so make your expectations for library visits clear.
I want students to pick up on the fact that I think library days are events to anticipate.
When we line up to go to the library, every student must have a book to return, renew, or read, or a plan to get one at the library.
The Commission on Reading’s touchstone report Becoming a Nation of Readers recommends that students engage in two hours of silent sustained reading per week (Anderson, Hiebert, Scott, and Wilkinson, 1985).
Don and I prefer to read our books curled up on the couch at home, but we do not need an ideal environment in order to snatch some reading time.
As I often do when confronted with an ideal that I cannot seem to achieve, I stepped back to reconsider the true intent of the dedicated reading corner. As I see it, the reading area in a classroom is meant to serve two purposes: to send the message to students that reading is important by setting aside a prominent place for it in the room and to provide students with comfortable conditions in which to read by not confining them to institutionally mandated seating at desks under harsh lighting. Can we do this without the community rug and the floor lamps? Of course we can.
Building a trusting relationship with students is easier when you expect them to do the right thing instead of assuming that they are not.
know that talking about books is vital to a reading community,
give my students outright permission to abandon books that are not working for them. Readers choose what to read and when to stop reading a book that doesn’t live up to its potential. I never want my students to feel that they are roped into a book just because they have started reading it.
“Hey, there is always another book waiting. If you are reading a book that is too hard or too boring to keep going, abandon it, and get another one. The important thing is not to let a bad book choice slow down your momentum for reading. Readers do this all of the time. Don’t feel that you have to stick with a book just because you started it.”
I believe that students should be empowered to make as many book choices as possible, including the books we read together. The idea of students clamoring to read favorite books feeds into my goal for getting them excited about reading. By valuing their opinions, even about the books we share as a class, I let them know that their preferences are as important as mine.
An entire bookcase in my living room is filled with books I am planning to read—books I have borrowed, checked out from the library, or purchased.
Ten books or twenty books are not enough to instill a love of reading in students. They must choose and read many books for themselves in order to catch the reading bug. By setting the requirement as high as I do, I ensure that students must have a book going constantly.
I have never had a student who reached the forty-book mark stop there. Students continue to read even after the requirement is met.
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