When READ is a Four-Letter Word

Imagine for just a second that you HATE reading. You see it only as something required for school, instead of an enjoyable activity that brings you knowledge, escape, freedom, entertainment, or examples of gorgeous writing. Chances are this negativity toward reading has been affecting your grades, and probably your behavior, since elementary school. Because when other students are working on assignments independently, you can’t do it, get frustrated, and become gifted at using avoidance techniques. Then adding insult to injury, when you advance to middle school you have an elective taken away…a fun class like art, teen living, tech ed, or coding…so that you can spend 50 minutes of your day being forced to do something that you hate. Needless to say, at the beginning of the year, there are some VERY hostile feelings when students are placed in a reading intervention class.

So, I think it is extremely important to combat some of that negativity starting on Day 1. I spend a lot of time at the beginning of the year getting to know my students. We complete surveys about our lives, our attitudes about reading and writing, and our reading preferences. We also complete identity webs (Check out Being the Change by Sara K. Ahmed). I say we, because anything I ask the students to complete, I do myself. I believe that relationships are key in our classroom. The students need to know that they can trust me, especially when they are likely coming at reading from a vulnerable standpoint.

Another important key to my students’ success is that I am a self-proclaimed, proud book nerd. There is no way that I could serve as a reading teacher without being a reader myself. As Carol Jago stated in a recent article, “When teachers tell stories from their own reading lives about books they have read again and again, about books they have abandoned, about books that made them cry, students will wonder if there might be something between those pages for them.”

We have a classroom library of over 500 titles at different reading levels, including picture books, graphic novels, story anthologies, novels in verse, fiction and nonfiction. Students have time every single day to read a book that THEY choose. If our classroom library doesn’t have what they need, we are blessed with a beautiful, functional, fully staffed school library. We participate in book passes, book talks, read-alouds, and book trailers. We watch YouTube videos of authors reading chapters from their own books. And this year for the first time, thanks to #kidsneedmentors, we had an author visit our classroom! 

It's not always as simple as giving a child a book and saying, "Here...read this." I ease the students into a reading routine starting the first day of school. After a book pass, we read for five minutes to see if the book is a good fit for them. Then we work up to 10 minutes. It is possible to have classes read for up to 20 minutes, but after an extended break, we usually need to start building up reading stamina all over again.

Every day, students enter our room and read the agenda posted on the board. There is a reminder at the top that for the first 15 minutes, the classroom is device-free. This is dedicated daily independent reading time. Sometimes students read books independently, sometimes with a partner or small group. We have tried many different strategies to keep track of our reading, but what works the best for us is Status of the Class. (Check out The Reading Zone by Nancie Atwell and Reading in the Wild by Donalyn Miller). Basically, I keep a list for each class of the book titles each student is reading and their page numbers. This cuts down on the time it takes for students to figure out what page they left off on and allows me to quickly see how long it takes them to get through their books. 

A few years ago, I started using Donalyn Miller’s 40 Book Challenge. This is a way for students to examine different genres and find out what they like/dislike. I have adapted the genre choices a little each year, based on what is popular with our classes. It’s also super important to have books of varying lengths because the majority of my kiddos are overwhelmed by chapter books at first. Even when I’ve read aloud from novels in verse like Swing by Kwame Alexander and show them how much white space there is on each page, I am met with, “That’s too LONG!” 

I would LOVE to be able to tell you that with all of these strategies firmly in place in our room starting on Day 1, all of our students find a book they are interested in and jump right in and read. But, this is not always the case. We’re trying to overcome what could potentially be YEARS of negative feelings about reading. It's hard work. And here’s a little something I've learned…you can force students into intervention, but you can’t make them read. They legitimately have to WANT to. Sometimes a victory is a student who has never before read a book on his/her/their own finishing one book in a school year. 

Our students deserve the gift of daily reading time with access to books that they choose for themselves, because it is absolutely the best practice for helping our young people become self-sufficient readers.