Carolyn Shackelford Novemeber Blog Post - Routman Chp. 3 Share Your Reading Life

I have known for quite a while now how important it is to connect with your students at the beginning of the year. I usually do this through sharing pictures of my family and stories about my husband and kids. The beginning of Routman's chapter "Share Your Reading Life" discusses how, as reading teachers, we should share with our students how we feel about reading and how reading makes us feel. This chapter also encourages us to share with our students other insights into our reading lives such as; what we are reading and why we've chosen those texts, why we have a personal library, and our favorite authors and books.


I really enjoyed the "Try it, Apply it" sections in this chapter that gave great examples of activities to do with your students that mirror what you do as an adult reader. I especially liked several of the suggestions from the section that discussed how to choose what to read. One of the suggestions was to keep a list of books they wanted to read. I recently stumbled upon this idea quite by accident. When we received our two boxes of new books for our classroom libraries, I was trying to figure out how to share so many new books with my students and spark their interest in them besides just holding them up, reading the back and moving onto the next one. A Pinterest idea that I had saved was to give each student a book, and sitting in a circle, have them open it up and read anywhere for five minutes and then move onto the next book. We did exactly that with our new books. I even included a few "speed rounds" where they only had a few minutes to quickly look at the cover and flip through them. Almost all of the students showed interest in some of the books they came across as we passed the books around the circle. A few started to express concern that they would forget which books they had liked. Quickly, I had them pull out their Reading Notebooks and on the last page write down any titles they were interested in reading later and the lexile level so that they could go to our classroom library and find it later.


In this chapter, Routman emphasizes yet again, what an important teaching tool modeling is for readers. We need to inspire our students to find pleasure in reading not just do it because it is a requirement.