Choosing Books Makes a Difference

My entire childhood I did not enjoy reading. I didn’t like to read anything! It wasn’t until I was about 18 that I picked up a book and just fell in love with it. It sounds silly, but this book was “Bergdorf Blondes.” It was something that I could relate to and that was the winning ticket! Choosing a book is so important. Most of the time students are given a text book to read and are required to read what their teacher assigns. This model of teaching is flawed. Students should be exposed to a variety of different texts and different genres. We want our students to grow up with a love for reading that will carry over into their adult life. In chapter 5 in “Strategies That Work” the author confirms by viewpoint and explains that any strategy can be taught with any book.  In my classroom, I keep a wide variety of books in my classroom library. However, many books are chosen for us. I strive to make sure that my students enjoy reading and know that it is not just a chore. We pick out books at the media center and I model my love for reading. This year I have started keeping some of my favorite books on my desk to read, and also keeping track of my favorite books with a reading log. I have seen the effect this has on my students. They are loving it! Every day they come in and want to share with me what books they read at home. I love that they get more choices.

According to Harvey (2007), “We often ask teachers to write down the different types of reading they’ve done over the past few weeks. Usually, they mention newspapers, magazines, letters, manuals, cookbooks, brochures, reports, letters, and so on. Many also have a novel or a long non-fiction trade book going, but 80 percent of the reading they report is of the short-text variety.” However, she also stated that in schools students mostly read 80 percent of long-text variety. I love the idea of exposing students to more short-texts. When choosing a short-text, we need to consider the purpose, genre, audience, topic, quality, and text structure.  We also live in a technological age where students are able to access and find many short texts. At the intermediate or high school level, students can definitely find magazine articles online, newspaper articles, magazine clippings, or other short texts for their own reading pleasure. Giving students a topic and allowing them to expand of that and choose their own reading selections will motivate them, while also increasing their comprehension. I can imagine something like this could be done along with a required reading. Students can choose shorter texts that correlate with an assigned topic. I believe giving students guidelines, without setting limits, could make assignments take off! They sky could be the limit!

While I find myself often trying to relate to older students, I love kindergarten! So I wonder how this would look in kindergarten, as mostly everything we read is pretty short. However, I currently implement many different genres of texts. This week, we have been reading collections of poetry and discussing what makes a poem different from a story. My students are already starting to understand that some texts are shorter than others. We also just got in some National Geographic magazines that I plan on introducing to my students.

But Where Does Comprehension Fit in?

I often find myself struggling teaching comprehension with my guided reading books, mainly because my books are so simple and repetitive. Kindergarten books are generally focused on the decoding aspect of reading rather than higher thought. So how do we get all these awesome comprehension strategies in? We model them. When we read aloud with our students we can model all of the great strategies we learn. I can think aloud about what I am thinking or feeling as I am reading, while also asking probing questions to prompt my students thinking. Even if my students are not answering the questions I am asking, they are listening to them and thinking about it. Modeling comprehension strategies are a key when reading with emergent readers. This week in my classroom I intend to model that thinking not only during my shared reading, but in my guided reading groups as my kids work on a decoding skill.