This week my Principal gave out an article to the Lower School teachers entitled, “Making Sustained Silent Reading Really Count: Tips on Engaging Students” by Katherine Hilden and Jennifer Jones. We discussed the article and what this could look like in the different classrooms. The article focuses not on the research as to whether or not sustained silent reading is good for kids, but about how to make sustained silent reading (SSR) meaningful and useful time spent for each student. The authors of the article put together a profile of different types of readers. It is written on a continuum and shows types of readers and how much teacher support is required for each level. For example, the student with the highest need for teacher support are the ones they reference as “fake readers” and the ones that need very little teacher support are called, “bookworms”.
The article mentions that in order to keep tabs on the types of readers you have in your classroom; it will take regular conferencing with the students. At this point in the article we spun off into an engaged discussion about how to find time to conference with all of our students in the classroom. We are a dual curriculum school; this means that we only have about three hours to teach all of our general studies to our students. This does not leave much time per subject and our teachers have to be creative as to how to spend their time. The fifth grade teacher was struggling with how to find time to conference with so many students. One idea that was suggested in the meeting was to conference with a few students per day, and expects to get to each student once every two weeks. This would be enough meetings to gather data to find out where the students are in their reading, but not be overly stressful or overwhelming for the teacher to find time to do this. Another suggestion was to conference with a couple students at a time who are about the same level, or perhaps reading the same book. The fifth grade teacher had another great idea involving a journal. Instead of having the students write a summary in their journals of their reading that week, she has the students write her a letter. She provided the students with a rubric as to what she wants included in the letter and a sample that she, the teacher wrote. I thought this was a great idea, it gives the teachers specific information about the book (because of the rubric) and allows her to monitor if her students are actually getting through the books since she has expectations of how many books they should read by the end of the year. I really enjoy these meetings with the Lower School teachers because we tackle practical issues the teachers are having. It is inspiring to see that when teachers get together and have the opportunity to share, how much they can learn from and help each other!
Hilden, K., Jones, J. (2012). Making Sustained Silent Reading Really Count: Tips on Engaging Students. Reading Today, 17-19.
rebeccaaf 