Sharing my reading life with my students is something I've never thought about doing. As much as I love to discuss and share books with the students, I never thought to bring up a discussion of what I have been reading with them. That is a wonderful strategy to get the students interested in reading! This chapter gave me some ideas that I can use to get my students interested in finding the right books to read.
First, I liked the idea of creating a "top-ten" or "best seller" book list, based on what students are presently reading. It stirs interest in them from their peers, and it can be displayed in the classroom to remind them of books they want to read. Secondly, creating a better class library would help give students more choices for reading. Getting books for my classroom is always challenging. I go to the book sales each year and get a few, but I still don't have enough variety of genres to choose from. That will continue to be an ongoing project of mine. I have the students for short classes throughout the day, so some days we read together in a content area, and some days we read just for improvement, (but I tell them we will read for fun).
Lastly, I've always had the students keep a reading log of what they read daily, and have the parents or other teachers sign their logs. After reading Routman's idea of the reading record, I'm going to give that a try. Routman states that "when students keep their own reading records, they stop worrying about book levels, and the number of pages and minutes they read." "It becomes less of a chore for them."
This chapter ended with "Demonstrating Your Pleasure in Reading," Some of my favorite lessons are reading a book out loud to my class for enjoyment. My students don't get many opportunities to be read to, so this is one way to share a small amount of my "reading life" with them! According to Routman, this is a way to instill the love of reading in students, and create life-long readers. What could be a better reward than that?
It's kind of funny, but I have learned more about myself as a reader in the past few years than I ever knew about myself all the way through college! You have some wonderful ideas in here to try out with your students--I'd love to hear how the reading records go!
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