Boy is this important! I don’t like reading something I’m not interested in…why would my students? And, Beers points out that we typically want to share what we enjoy and that just might not be what our students enjoy. Ah Ha!
Beers shares some terrific resources for finding good reading material and points out the value of text features, length of text, pictures/illustrations with text and more. All of her strategies make sense, but I think the “Know Your Authors” could be a real selling point for some students. Students could connect to an author before they connected to one of their books. The “Book Jacket Bulletin Board” is another terrific idea. You could extend this and have students put sticky notes on the jacket after they read the book with comments. And the “Good Books” box was brilliant! I loved the fact that the Librarian really got involved in attracting the students to books…adding the “More Good Books” box.
Finding books, articles, and text that students want to read takes time. Beers shows us that taking the time to find material your students will read is worth it. Taking the time to get to know your students will pay off in the long run; they will see that you care and are willing to make the effort on their behalf. This might be all they need to make the effort for themselves (selfish-readers).
No comments:
Post a Comment