I never wanted to read aloud throughout my early years of education. Even now as I am in college classes I still cringe when a professor asks me to read aloud. It's not that I don't know how, but it's the fear of messing up in front of my peers. I imagine that if I didn't know how to read that reading independently would also emphasize this fear. It is important that we encourage all of our students to read aloud and for comprehension. I really liked how the book emphasized reading into every activity that you do in your classroom. Reading is an essential part to daily life and doing so with every activity will help your students understand that it is important, regardless of how often they are exposed to it in their lives at home.
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For example, as soon as I learned how to read I was eager to read stories to my younger brother like my parents had read to me. He was encouraged to learn how to read at a young age because I could already do this. I really liked how the book emphasized having older children read to the beginning readers. This helps to build confidence in both of the students.
I really liked the idea of having reading journals to documents not only what the students are reading, but also how long they are reading. This would help me as a teacher to visually see which students need more exposure to reading in school. It helped to emphasize the point to me that we should not only make a comfortable reading spot in our classrooms, but they we should schedule personal reading time everyday, which is something I did not always have in my school.
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How do we as educators provide a comfortable reading environment and the time away from instruction for reading?
As educators, I think a great and simple way to provide a comfortable reading environment is to set up a specified reading area in our classrooms. This could be a reading couch or a reading bathtub as shown in the picture above. I think that the most important thing is to have books in the classroom that are easily accessible to students. Also, because reading is so important, I agree that there should be time designated for independent reading. Ideally this would be every day for at least 15 minutes. As educators we should also try to incorporate reading lessons in everyday tasks, such as writing notes to remind us of things we need to do in the classroom, which was mentioned in the Bell & Jarvis article.
ReplyDeleteAway from 15 minutes of D.E.A.R. (drop everything and read) everyday, we never really had much time allocated to reading just for fun. This changed in the 4th grade when I had a teacher who loved to read. In free time, she would read a chapter book aloud to us, or we could read a book we brought from home or picked from her book shelf. Reading was the norm and hobby of our class- so we all enjoyed it. She even dedicated an entire D.E.A.R. day, where we all got to bring in sleeping bags and read all day. I think making students comfortable with reading can be taught by example.
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