M. Jeter December Blogpost 5

Reggie Routman’s Reading Essentials, ‘Share Your Reading Life’

                For December’s blogpost, I chose to write about Routman’s section 3. This chapter was about sharing your own personal reading life with your students. I think that this is important to do. If you share your reading life with your students, this will spark interest in them to want to read as well. Routman writes about ten specific things that we, as teachers, can share with our students about our own personal reading habits. Those things include the following;

Share Our Reading Habits

               

Share Our Passion for Reading

                When students know that you, as the teacher, have a passion for reading, they too, will want to share that passion.

Discuss the Importance and Pleasure of Having a Personal Library

                Students should know that there are more libraries than the ones at school (or in an actual library). I think that it is important for students to know that you can buy and collect all of the different types of books that you enjoy and make your own personal library at home. That way, you can choose to read those books that you like, from you own personal collection.

Talk About Favorite Authors and Favorite Books

                I think that it is a good idea to share with students some of our (teachers) favorite books. They will be able to get a little insight into what types of books we enjoy reading in our own personal time.

Talk about How Book Clubs Work

                Let students know that they could be part of an actual club that talks about books. This, I think, would excite lots of students because what kid doesn’t like to be part of a club. Students would be able to read a book of their choice and then they would get to talk about it with other friends that also enjoy similar books.

Explain How You Choose to Read

                Tell students that you don’t just pick up the first book you see, but rather that you go through a sort of process. Choosing a book could be by taking a recommendation from a friend, results from a book review, a book from a best-seller list, an award winning book or even from just browsing at a local book store. Choosing a book can be exciting and fun.

Read a Variety of Genres

                Reading a variety of genres and different types of books allows for different types of understanding. Reading biographies, poetry, humor, classical, fables, science fiction etc., gives you a healthy reading ‘diet’, a balance of all different things.

Maintain a Reading Record

                Keep up with when you read, what you read and how much you read. Keeping track of what you read allows you to be sure that you are reading a variety of genres, as stated before.

Show your students How You Read       

                Use read-aloud time and one-on-one reading with students to show them how to read, how to focus on the words that they read and the meaning behind it.

Demonstrate Your Pleasure in Reading

                We have to let students know that reading can be enjoyable and fun. Students shouldn’t think of reading as something that we HAVE to do, but that it can be something that we WANT to do.