As I began reading Reading Essentials I flipped through the first 2 chapters and noticed the quote at the beginning of chapter 2: "The modeling by people that we love is what changes us" (p.11). Those are powerful words that really stuck out to me! How true is that!? I am the person I am today because of people I love and the years I have spent trying to do things like them because I love them. That's exactly how I want things to happen in my classroom. I want my students to want to model their behaviors after me because they love me. Such great responsibility, but a great reminder of why I became a teacher!
Now, on to the importance of sharing my reading life with my students. I have always believed it was important that my students understand that I am a reader and I read because I enjoy it (most of the time)! I love sharing what I'm reading with them!
I would really like to revamp my "reading log" system-especially after reading this chapter! I have often struggled with the effectiveness of reading logs as homework. How many parents simply sign it without knowing that their child has read? How many kids write nonsense in the summary section because they don't care about it? How often do I actually read all that they write in their log? After asking myself these questions-I see that I may need to change my methods! Routman expressed that she doesn't believe reading logs should be assigned because they pass responsibility from the child to the parent and I think that I agree with her-even though I've never thought about it that way before! I loved her suggestion of having a reading record. I really would like to create a reading record for myself because I would love to have a log of all the books that I have read! I think this would be an excellent replacement of reading logs! I could have the students keep a reading record for each month, as Routman did. I think it would be empowering to have the kids look back at a record of every book they read throughout the entire school year. I'm going to try them out! I have high hopes for them!
Yes, that is a wonderful quote!! I'm excited to see how your reading records turn out. Donalyn Miller has also done some work on alternatives to the traditional reading log--I uploaded some of her templates to our Arcadia Literacy and Tech Resources course on ItsLearning. :-)
ReplyDeleteI would love to see these too - are these from her book, The Book Whisperer?
DeleteHi Keri,
ReplyDeleteI love that you are considering Routman's reading record instead of a traditional reading log. A reading record provides us so much more of what a reader thought, felt, learned from the text then a traditional log does with the title, author, pages, and parent signature. Like you I loved Routman's reminder that we need to model our reading lives and what we love to read and why because we are a powerful model for our students to follow. If we are intentional about sharing our book love, our students can't help but be influenced by it. Thank you! Dawn