Sharing our Reading Lives

Routman states “When we make our reading lives explicit to our students, their reading lives expand in many directions.” (Reading Essentials, p. 25) I have witnessed two teachers share their reading lives with students, much in the way that Dr. Place shared her reading life with us on the first day of class. These teachers talked about all the different kinds of reading they do, and brought along examples of what they were reading or had just finished. But I did not find that this influenced the students as readers. Although we state that we do all types of reading, students are still expected to read books in class during reading time. How do we show students that reading magazines, recipes, websites, and newspapers are valuable reading experiences that they can enjoy too? How do we bring these experiences into the classroom? Some students may be more drawn to these kinds of reading than to books.

Last quarter I read Spectacular Things Happen Along the Way (Schultz, 2008). Brian Schultz brought newspapers, journals, and websites into the classroom and used them to reach struggling fifth grade students. These students were much more motivated to construct meaning from these texts because they revolved around a project that was important to them, fixing their school. Schultz bonded with his students in all the ways Routman listed (Reading Essentials, p. 12) and this is really what drove them as readers. So perhaps the lesson here is to get to know your students’ interests and incorporate those into reading in the classroom and also to broaden our definition of acceptable reading mediums.

One thing this makes me think about is having students gather information on all the types of reading they do at school and at home and share those with us. Perhaps a few students could share their reading lives with the class each day after we model by sharing our reading lives with them. This way we can celebrate their reading experiences while expanding other students’ views of reading and perhaps find some new types of texts to fit into the classroom. This could be the first step in getting to know students better and then revamping the classroom library to meet their interests and needs as readers.

One last thought from our class discussion last week. Reading has many social components, but in the classroom it is often solitary. How can we change that? Besides sharing our reading lives, I like Routman's ideas for using book talks, author shares across classrooms, top ten lists, book clubs and more (p. 30-32). This social component of reading has the opportunity to excite even more students about reading.