The essentials in reading focus was evident in this section. Miller made it clear that IR/ independent reading is a MUST & needs to be daily accessed through practice. In doing so this should improve fluency & comprehension. While being allowed to reading on their interest this can help build vocabulary & increase their reading achievement while enjoying their book of choice. I feel the teacher must conference & help guide in book selections so that all of these achievement can be applied & achieved. All studies show that children that read daily typically score well on the standardized tests... now the questions is how to make this time available & valuable!
Keeping all this in mind, I have begun to reevaluate my classroom library. I'm listening, asking & seeing what my horizon students are reading & are interested in reading. I have made suggestions & I am continuing to find used books on www.thiftbooks.com for a reasonable price to have variety in genre, informational text & nonfiction interest. I love the idea of self-selection & had no idea the impact that it is twice as powerful in their reading development. Growing up round robin reading & basal books with tests each week; the pressure to test well & pronounce words correctly when it was your turn made me focus more on pre-reading ahead instead of focusing on what was actually being read. I think we are getting to the real focus by allowing more self-selected reading.
I really liked the genre wheel design on page#20 to use to assign students to read at least one book from all ten genres. I would use this in a regular ELA classroom to reference & conference with students to help keep track. As their horizons/challenge teacher I want to do my best to encourage & motivate challenge reading goals for them. I will try by continuing to enhance vocabulary within our unit studies & providing higher level books for them to read. I'm interested to find more ways to help my students meet these challenging needs & grow a love of reading!
Jennifer, I am so glad you are reflecting on ways to encourage reading with your gifted students. The biggest challenge I always found with my high readers was finding appropriate texts within their ZPD that interested them! They would often gravitate towards books that were too easy for them. I would tell them that there is nothing wrong with that, as long as they are also reading some appropriately leveled texts, as well. Often they would not see the growth they wanted to see because it was difficult to find books they wanted to read that were within their reading range. I often had to use www.lexile.com to help them find books. I look forward to seeing your library grow as you you get to know your students' reading preferences!
ReplyDeleteJennifer Pittman! I am going to hug you the next time I see you! I loved reading your blog post and seeing how you are providing your Horizons students with choice over what they are reading and working to find out what their interests are so you can strategically add books to your library and recommend them to your library as well. Thank you also for sharing the thriftbooks website! I will be saving and sharing that one later! Sincerely, Dawn Mitchell
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