What Am I Reading Today?

Quick note: Brainiac's TreeHouse will be ready for you next week. I'm waiting for the proofs from the publisher right now.

The short answer to the question in the title above is Kelly Gallagher's Reading Reasons: Motivating Mini-Lessons for Middle and High School. I read slowly, so I've not gotten too far as of this writing and would like to use this space to reflect a little on what I've covered.

Gallagher's first building block for creating enthusiastic readers is to surround them with lots and lots of high interest books. He uses Warwick Elley's term "book flood" to describe this. "Make your world a world of books," the president of my college told incoming freshmen. Sorry I don't remember his name because that sentence has stuck in my head for many, many years. It was wonderful advice.

I remembered it when my son was born. His room, like the living room in our house and like my bedside table, became a place of books. As he learned to walk, he used to like to pull the books off the shelf and pile them on the floor, then try to put them back up again. He loved to be read to, which we did just as much as he liked, and he loved to simply handle the books. Today? Yup. He's a reader at almost forty, having been raised swimming in a book flood.

Galagher's second building block is to give students a time and a place to read. I'd say this includes having a time and a place to read to them also. And let's not stop this when they are able to read on their own. We all enjoy the comforting sensation of being read to.

Gallagher is an advocate of "sustained silent reading"(SSR). I've been in schools where everything stops while everybody in the building reads silently for ten minutes--principal, teachers, office folks, kids, everybody. What a relaxing ten minutes! What a beautiful sound is that silence!

The third building block, and the last I've gotten to so far, is for teachers to model the value of reading. Parents, too, of course. If all we do is tell them THEY should read, without being readers ourselves, . . . well, you get the picture.

Hey, get yourself a copy of my popular book of drawings and poems, Kerfuffle!