To say that we love reading in our classroom would be a very large understatement. Please insert multiple heart eyes emojis! :D I am often asked how I get my kids to love reading. My goal is to write a series of blog posts on the various different components of a successful, passionate, and engaging reading program!
This first blog will be about student choice. I can't stress enough the importance of allowing students to read what they love. If you all have not read the life changing, inspiring book: The Book Whisperer by Donalyn Miller, please RUN over to
Amazon and get yourself a copy!
Donalyn teaches 6th grade and while I was reading the book I kept thinking how can I take all of these gems and make it work for lower elementary??
One of the many things that the book inspired me to do was implement more student choice. A way to do that is through student reading surveys. I found several on-line but none were just perfect for my class so as any good teacher would do, I cut and pasted several surveys to make one that fit the needs of my class. :D I then had my students fill them out. The survey asked questions about their favorite books, series, authors, genres and why they liked them. It was very telling. So now if I am at Half Priced Books or Goodwill or about to place another Scholastic book order, I think about those surveys and it guides what I buy for my classroom library. And here's one more thing. Kids are amazed that you would care enough to ask them what they think AND respond to something that they want or like! Isn't it always the other way around, teacher-led, teacher-directed?? That is not how I want to run my classroom and my kids know it! Their voice matters. Period.
Here's an example of that in action.
I have a little one that at the beginning of school would only read the Mo Willems Piggie and Gerald books. I overheard him the first week of school tell a classmate he didn't like reading. This little guy is below level in his reading, not a ton, but enough where it's difficult for him to keep up with most of his peers. So, I instantly got to work thinking of turning this little guy not just into a successful 2nd grade reader but one that would LOVE reading by the end of the year!
One of the things I did instead of fighting, coercising and cajoling him about his one and only book series choice, was I applauded it. I created a basket in our classroom library of every Mo Willems book I could find and whispered to my friend that he inspired me to add that basket to our already overflowing classroom library. His face just beamed.
Now, instead of reading just Piggie and Gerald, he has broadened out and has read everything else that Mo Willems has written. The next Scholastic book order that rolled around, I ordered Mo's latest and told my friend that I am always thinking about my readers and wanting to get books that they like for our classroom library. You should have seen how proud he looked as I said this in front of all of his classmates.
Now many of you may think, gosh is he only going to read Piggie and Gerald books? The answer is no. As I continued to get to know him as a reader, I found out that he loved sports, particularly baseball. Sure enough if on the next book order I found a simple biography on Jackie Robinson. It was the next book that I saw in his hands.
A more overall example of student choice is our 100 book challenge. Our school no longer uses Accelerated Reader (AR). Insert happy dance emojis right here folks. I'm sorry if you are a huge fan but AR is not something I was looking forward to as I moved up to 2nd grade this year. This post is not about bashing AR so I'm not going to camp out on that subject. All I'm going to say is that I was not going to buy into the whole penalizing students for not meeting their "AR goal" fiasco that often happens at schools. Talk about a way to make struggling readers hate reading. Talk about a way to not make reading meaningful to the reader! I will NEVER make reading have negative consequences. Ever. Reading is fun. Engaging. Inspiring. Takes you on a journey without ever leaving your seat. It's magical. Not to mention that the latest research shows that 90 percentage of the comprehension questions on the AR tests are on the two lowest levels of Bloom's Taxonomy : Remember and Understand. Where are the higher levels of critical thinking: Analyzing, Synesthizing, Evaluating and Creating??? Aagghh. Someone help me off the edge!! Getting off track here. Sorry. That is another post for another day!
Back to our 100 book challenge. One way to inspire students to read was through the 100 book Challenge. It's all student choice, which I love, but it needed a few parameters. So what I did was put a few "guidelines" in place. With each page of 25, they have to read chapter books and non fiction books . It looks something like this:
First 25: 1 chapter book , 2 non-fiction
Second 25: 2 chapter books, 4 non-fiction
Third 25: 3 chapter books, 6 non-fiction
Fourth 25: 4 chapter books, 8 non-fiction
Students still have choice throughout but I want to make sure they are reading longer texts and different genres. Now here's the problem that I encountered early on, how to check comprehension. Are they just skimming through the books and logging them in or are they really understanding the text? Up front, I'm going to say that I have not figured all this out but what I have done is working (ish) for now! :D I've started to do readers response in their interactive readers notebook. I write to my students and we dialogue back and forth. It's s great way, albeit time-consuming way, to check comprehension.
As they complete each sheet of 25, I pick one or two books from that sheet and ask them comprehension questions. They absolutely LOVE this authentic, personalized correspondence between the two of us. Connecting reading and writing. Love it, so much. I wish I could spend all day just writing back and forth but to make it meaningful it just takes time, which as busy, busy teachers we don't have.
So these are just a few ways that I focus on student choice to engage readers. What do you do in your classroom? I'd love to hear!
