Creating a community of readers matters. Especially at the beginning of the school year, it’s critical that you take time to build a classroom community full of respect, with appreciation for each person and all their differences, and with a commitment to kindness.
One of the best quotes I’ve found about why creating a community of readers matters comes from one of our second grade reading units, “Becoming a Big Kid Reader. ”
“It matters that children see themselves as capable readers, that they see reading as something that people like them love, that they see reading as part and parcel of all that is nearest and dearest to them.”
When you provision kids with the time, space, and explicit instruction needed to help your reading community flourish, you’ll find that the sky’s the limit for the kind of learning that can take place in your reading workshop.
Here are three powerful moves that can help you establish a powerful reading community in your classroom:
Explicitly teach and practice the habits and skills of good readers.
There are various habits and skills students need to be a successful reader. Reading stamina, for instance, helps kids stay engaged in their book, and this sustained attention while independently reading can help to accelerate reading growth. You can teach specific strategies that help students grow their reading stamina, such as preparing your reading materials prior to reading, setting goals for the amount of time you’ll read, making a plan for what you’ll do during reading time, and reflecting on your reading stamina and setting new goals.
Modeling skills like previewing, word solving, monitoring for sense, and rereading early on in the year can help students build a toolkit of strategies that they can reach for when texts get difficult. You might share with your students problems that occur when you are reading and highlight how you use the skills to solve them. This also helps students to understand that reading trouble happens to all of us. What matters is that we turn to reliable strategies to help ourselves get unstuck.
After you explicitly model a strategy for students, you’ll want to provide time for students to practice the strategy in an appropriately challenging text - one that’s not so easy that no strategies are needed, and one that’s not so hard where everything presents difficulty.
The specific lessons you’ll teach will vary from grade to grade. It’s powerful to chart these strategies as you teach them, so that students can more easily draw on a repertoire of strategies as they read. These charts come from Grade 1 Unit 1 in the Units of Study in Reading, Building Good Reading Habits.
Develop your students’ reading identities.
Another part of building a powerful reading community is helping your students to develop their reading identities. It’s essential that we communicate to students that they belong in the classroom and that they are members of a powerful literacy community. This is especially important for students who may already feel as if reading isn’t for them.
One way to do this is by inviting students to think, “What are times when reading has felt like gold? What are times when reading has felt the best it can be?” Students can share those times with partners or clubs, and you can mine their experiences to learn more about what really works for them as readers. For instance, if Javier says, “I love when my Papa reads books to me at bedtime,” you might say, “Wow! Javier loves when someone reads aloud to him. Does anyone else in this class love to be read aloud to? This year, let’s make sure we have read aloud at least once a day, so that we can all hear books read aloud. Thanks for that suggestion, Javier.”
Students might think about the best places for themselves to read independently - seated at their desks, curled up on the rug in the classroom library, back to back with their reading partner?
Book tastings can help students begin to curate their “Want to Read” lists, and it can help them to learn about the kinds of books they gravitate toward. Reading partners can share book buzzes with one another, discussing the books they’ve especially loved, and suggesting other readers that might love those books as well.
After a few weeks of reading workshop, you might give students time to reflect on the books that especially matter to them, creating a class chart about the kinds of books that students in the classroom particularly love.
The essence of this readerly identity work should be to help kids finish the statement, “I am the kind of reader who…” Your teaching here should make it clear to all students that everyone can be a reader.
Walk the walk and talk the talk. Share your own reading life.
If you expect your students to develop their own reading lives, it is essential that you share your reading life with your students as well. Do this with joy! You might take time each day in the beginning of the year to read aloud from your favorite picture books, poems, or articles. As you read aloud, model your fascination with the text, linger with authors’ powerful word choices, and share the questions you want to think more about.
Tell students about your author-obsessions, or about new releases you just can’t wait to get your hands on. For instance, you might share about how a book you love, The Wild Robot by Peter Brown, is coming out as a movie. If you attend our upcoming Saturday Reunion and hear from Peter Brown directly, you could share quotes from his talk with students as a way to help them learn more about the authors you love. You could even share more about the process Peter used to write his book.
Another way to model your love of reading is to share how the characters of the books you’ve read have helped shape you as a human. For instance, if you read aloud Back Home: Story Time with My Father by Arlène Elizabeth Casimir, you could emphasize how you learned from Lune, the daughter of two Haitian immigrants, about the power of learning from your parents’ stories. Then, let students teach you how the characters of their books have shaped them. In short, ooze love for the written word and they too will begin to love reading.
We know that when we see ourselves as a member of a community, when something becomes part of our identity, we welcome the work that it takes to grow as a member of that community. When the time spent reading feels sacred, you’ll have less interruptions and less time off-task, which, of course, means more time for reading. And more time for reading, in turn, creates readers who feel capable and strong.
Be sure to check out our September 2024 Teacher Toolkits, which provide more suggestions and tools to help you build a classroom reading community, as well as resources to support your writers. And sign up to receive our monthly Teacher Toolkits in your inbox!
