Book club meeting-week 2

Tracy, Ryan and I met and discussed many points from Dr. Allington’s book.  Some of the main points we discussed are listed below.

Chapters 2 and 3 from What Really Matters for Struggling Readers

How much reading is enough reading?

*Students who were assigned more reading time in school performed as well or better than students who did not have the additional time.

*The average higher-achieving students read approximately three times as much each week as their lower achieving classmates.

*Difference in amount of reading provides powerful explanatory evidence for differences in student vocabulary growth and vocabulary size.

*Struggling fourth-graders may need as much as 3-5 hours a day of successful reading practice to hope to catch up with more proficient peers.

*No core reading program contains enough reading material to develop high levels of reading proficiency in children.

*Schools can foster reading growth during summer months by providing children with books to read.  Benton Elementary gave every K-1 student, 10 books, on the last day of the school year, to take home and read over the summer break.

What should kids be reading?

*Appropriateness- a study found that only 1 of the 18 elementary science and social studies books they examined had readability levels at the grade level of intended use.

*Choice-it is important that students have easy access to interesting texts and ore provided choices over what to read, who to read with, and where to read. We should provide students with books that are of high interest.

*Text complexity- it is important that students have good teaching with effective modeling and demonstrating useful reading strategies.  There are different methods for determining text complexity.  Benton Elementary uses Fountas and Pinnell’s alphabetic system of leveling books A-Z

What can we do to enhance access to appropriate books?

*Library-a study found that children from lower-income homes especially need rich and extensive collections of books in the school library and in their classrooms.  Libraries must be available on an as-needed basis to be truly useful.

*Book room-school book rooms should have a collection of books that span the grades in the school.  Books may be organized by genre, author, or topic.  At this time, the BES book room is organized by reading level and in bins that separate fiction from non-fiction.

*Magazines-a rich classroom supply of magazines should be a staple for every elementary school.  In an ideal world, each child would have one or more magazine subscriptions of their choice. 

*Series books, junk reading series books offer a commonality in text structure and are of high interest to many students.

*Putting books in kids bedrooms-different programs exist to ensure that students not only have access to books at school, but also have access to appropriate books outside of school.

*Building and displaying classroom collections-The worst plan of displaying books in the classroom is to put them on a shelf with their spines facing out.  Classroom displays should be arranged to make it possible for the students to see the front cover of the book.  Teachers should have at least 500 titles in their classroom book collection and preferably even more.

With all of this said, the most important thing that we must do is train our teachers to be the most effective possible, so there is no wasted time and they model the correct way the first time.