Dr. Jan Burkins
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Do you have books they can actually read?

10/26/2019

3 Comments

 
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I recently had lunch with my dear mentor and she told me a story about working in a classroom and sitting with a first grade student who was just beginning to read. She asked him to share his independent reading book with her only to discover that it was much too hard for him to read on his own. They went together to the classroom library, which was beautifully organized by topic and areas of interest to the students. As it turned out, however, there was literally nothing in the classroom library that the reader could actually decode independently.

As you are assembling and organizing your classroom library consider the quality, the accessibility, and reading level of what is available to students. As Kim Yaris and I describe in Reading Wellness, at any given time students will be reading more than one text. For beginning readers, that should include variety in terms of difficulty. A single reader may have one or more picture books, which he or she may read by looking at the pictures and telling the story. Hopefully, he or she will also have some high-quality, controlled-vocabulary texts--decodable and/or patterned--to engage in the practice of decoding and constructing meaning.
3 Comments
Fran McVeigh
10/30/2019 10:55:43 am

It's not helpful when some literacy folks say that students should not have "independent reading at school" so students actually read less and end up completing more skill-based practice instead.

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Jan Burkins link
10/31/2019 03:05:53 am

Fran, thank you for your comment. I agree. It is hard to imagine that some take issue with the idea that a child could get better at reading without substantial practice! It is such an important piece to learning to read and, since the school assumes the responsibility of teaching children how to read, then there should be space for that practice to occur at school. Thank you, Fran!

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Cupertino Oven Repair link
7/25/2022 08:53:51 pm

Good readding your post

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