Today is the first day of The August Reading Challenge hosted by Pizza's book discussion. The idea is to see who can read the most books in the month of August. This is going to be tough for me because school starts on the 18th for me. Between lesson plans etc. my reading slows down a little. I teach four reading classes and I would love nothing more than have my students spend every one of those classes reading what they want to read. Unfortunately they are dormant readers or else just poor test takers and the state requires them to be place in my class. Maybe with all of the books I have read this summer I will be able to inspire them to read more. I will still have my sustained silent reading Wednesday's where I along with my students read each period. Yay! Six periods of reading for me. Good luck to everyone on whittling down your TBR pile with this challenge. I have almost finished Darkness Creeping by Neal Shusterman and have finished One for the Money by Janet Evanovich. I will write my review of these two books tomorrow. I need to finish this week The Killing Sea by Richard Lewis, Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli and The Book Thief by Markus Zuzak. This will finish off one or two more challenges I have participated in this summer. I told my students at the end of last school year that my personal reading goal this summer was 60+ books read from June 5th through August 17. When I complete the above mentioned books I will be 4 books away from reaching that goal. I read 50 children's books in addition to these novels but refused to count them because I told them that the 60+ would be YA or Adult novels or biographies. It is a great feeling to realize I have almost met and exceeded that goal. This also means that since I started keeping track of books read for this year I have read 76. That is not counting the ones I read starting in January and didn't record. I will keep better track this next year. I have already prepared the forms for me to keep at school so that I can entice my students to keep track as well.
The key to effective SSR is to properly match reading levels of the text to reading levels of the student, while maintaining some semblance of student choice.
ReplyDeleteLearn how to match reading levels of texts to reading levels of your students without time-consuming assessments. Also, learn how much independent reading is needed to make grade to grade progress. Check out How to Choose the Right Book.