a Look at a Book

It’s back to school time in the U.S. as I write this. Teachers here in the South started back to work last week, while teachers I know in the Midwest are heading back this week. If you’re like me, this is the time when you start to plan your first days – and weeks, if you’re awesomely organized – of school.

And while administrators may tell you to jump into curriculum as early as the second day of school(!!), bear in mind that it takes time to help your students develop the habits for how your classroom needs to run and how to be a reader in your classroom.

Resist any pressure you might be feeling to dive into “content” and remember that you need to “go slow to go fast” (an oft-used phrase during my teacher ed program).

Here’s what I mean: during those first 6-8 weeks of school, you’ll feel like you’re helping a baby take some first steps while he or she tightly grips onto your hands and stumbles every few steps. Students will stumble as they use the language you introduce to talk about books, and they won’t always put books back in the right spot.

But if you persist in consistently setting expectations and holding your students to those standards, you’ll find your students zooming along later in the year, talking about books together and keeping your classroom library organized. (For most classes, anyway. There are some years where you’ll go slow and keep plodding along the whole time. Take heart! Not every year is the same!)

Reading is a skill that uses so many subskills, and I have seen from experience how important it is to teach, reteach, and review the foundational skills of reading all throughout the year.

If you start the year off strong with these lessons, you’ll be setting yourself and your students up for success. 

A note: If you’re reading this and it’s not the beginning, but rather far into the school year, don’t despair! It’s never too late to stop and reset expectations or reinforce reading skills and classroom procedures.

So, as you plan for the beginning weeks of school, be sure you have scheduled in the following twelve reading lessons!

Reading-related Procedures

As any seasoned teacher knows, you have to set expectations for how kids do e v e r y t h i n g in the classroom before you ever do something new. At the beginning of the year all activities are new, so that includes things like how to line up, where to put their belongings, how to get the teacher’s attention . . . and also how reading-related things work too. Explicitly teaching how your library is organized and when they are permitted to browse for books, for example, helps avoid kids doing the wrong thing at the wrong time and keeps your classroom running more smoothly.

These procedures are essential to establish in the first weeks of school in all grade levels:

1. Explain (and practice!) how to use your classroom library 
2. Role play how to treat books
3. Practice stamina
4. Set expectations for independent reading time
5. Introduce how to track reading and/or set reading goals in your classroom
6. Establish how to talk about books together – kids need practice in having conversations with each other!

As you teach these procedures, you’ll establish a culture of reading in your classroom: that everyone is a reader. Everyone will read, and everyone will keep looking for books they love – even if they don’t find them at first. 🙂

Reading Skills

The following skills are also critical to teach early in the year to ensure your little readers blossom each school year. Many of them I wrote about in my Things Good Readers Do series, so I’ve linked them here in case you want to read more.

1. How to preview books
2. How to select “just right” or “right fit” books
3. How to decide if you should abandon books
4. How to determine and understand the genre of a book
5. How to predict what a book will be about and/or what might happen later in the book
6. How to check your predictions and adjust your understanding (this will likely happen while you’re teaching about #5, but might be a separate mini-lesson)
7. How to ask questions about a book before reading and during reading (also covered in the post linked to #5)
8. How to visualize what is happening in a book. Especially given how screens take away the need for that for so many things, kids need more practice visualizing story action than ever (tip: try reading The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles with your class for extended practice or review)

After you have explicitly taught these lessons, you’ll have a shared vocabulary for talking about reading and books, and you can and should use that vocabulary all throughout the year as you teach the content/curriculum that you’re required to teach. Pro tip: by teaching these topics at the beginning, you will actually begin to cover some of your reading standards, and you’ll get to build on them the whole rest of the year in your “official” curriculum.

My favorite years of teaching were the ones where I taught these procedures and skills in the first quarter of the year and reinforced them the for the other three quarters. It was so much easier for students to understand what I was talking about because I had taught them phrases like “abandon books” and “just right books” and the characteristics of genres.

My students grew in confidence in finding books they liked, discussing books, and also, of course, in their reading ability. They tried different genres and could read for longer than they could at the start of the year. Those are signs of learning! It made my teacher-heart swell to hear them giving book recommendations to each other, to receive book recommendations from them for my own reading, and to see the spark in their eyes as they found just right books.

May your classroom be filled with reading, this year and always!