Jessica Barwick: October Blog

Share Your Reading Life (Routman Ch. 3)

As an avid reader myself, I really enjoyed reading this chapter because it reminded me of the reasons I read and how I can show this to my students.  Just talking about how much I like to read is not the same as showing them through sharing my books (past, present, and future), discussing how I choose books, explaining that I talk about books with my friends. and modeling my thought processes when I read.  There are two main reasons people read:  to gain information and for pleasure.  Too often, the only reason we have children read is to have them gain information, either through nonfiction text or to learn and practice a specific reading skill.  The "pleasure" aspect is not emphasized enough.  I love Routman's reasons for reading, and I relate to each and every one:  "Reading gives me joy, comfort, perspective, new ideas, questions to ponder, and connections to other lives" (p. 24).  My goal is for my students to see reading as something to enrich their lives in these ways, rather than a chore to do just for school.

I love the idea of talking to students about their "now" book, "next" book, and "last" book.  While reading that section, I thought it would be fun to create a bulletin board or section in the room for students to display this on index cards, and change them out frequently.  I have noticed that my students love visual displays of their progress, and this might encourage them to finish books more often so that they can manually move their "now" book to a "last" book and "next" book to "now."  I also had this same idea for a more visual reading log to be displayed in the classroom when I was reading the section on maintaining a reading record.  At the beginning of the year, I had students glue a reading log into their reader's notebook, but with so many students coming and going in the classroom, I have not updated each person's notebook to have this reading log.  Because of this, I stopped emphasizing logging books after the first few weeks of school.  Perhaps if I made this process more visual as well, students would enjoy filling it in and seeing their progress.  I just want my students to be proud of themselves and their reading accomplishments!

I mentioned in another blog post that I wanted to do more "book talks" and this chapter recommends "authors talks" as well.  I related to when Routman states "Sadly, many of our students are hard pressed to cite even one author they know and like."  This is true because each year, one of my initial survey questions is "Who is your favorite author?" and most students leave this blank.  I would like to have a section in my classroom highlighting authors, as she suggests, but sometimes I get overwhelmed by all the ideas presented!  I took a suggestion from another reading we did and put together book baskets that are content related.  Now, there is a social studies basket and science basket that contains books related to our current unit of study.  Introducing an author basket and "student suggestions" baskets are new goals.

Finally, I would love to implement a little notebook to keep track of favorite passages.  We have been doing "sentence spotters" in class to capture figurative language and descriptive passages.  Having a notebook like this would be a great way for students to continue to think about author's craft, and they could use it to help their own writing.

All of the suggestions from this chapter could certainly help students develop their love of reading, but my biggest takeaway is that I need to share more about my own reading life with my students.  Throughout our readings, there seems to be a contradiction as to whether or not teachers should read at the same time as their students.  I see both arguments, and I certainly don't think teachers doing independent reading with their students should be the only independent reading time in the classroom.  However, I don't think there would be a problem with students seeing their teachers read every once in a while during independent reading time.  This would be the best way to share ourselves as readers and show that we love reading for pleasure.