Developing Life-Long Readers

Our reading curriculum outlines the wide variety of skills that students are expected to master in fourth grade.  But my overall goal is much more succinct: to develop talented, life-long readers.  A 2013 Huffington Post poll found that 28% of U.S. adults hadn’t read a book in at least a year, which is a statistic that I hope to help change.  Much of my reading instruction comes from an approach called Readers’ Workshop.  In Readers’ Workshop, the focus is on explicit instruction, followed by small-group practice and then independent application.  By transitioning from teacher-led to student-led learning, students are better able to develop and sharpen their skills, and I’m better able to work with students during small-group and independent time.  Another pillar of Readers’ Workshop is the use of mini-lessons.  Instead of spending an hour working on a broad skill, lessons tend to be shorter and focus on more discrete skills.  This, too, allows students to focus their learning and gives them a better opportunity to more immediately apply (and reinforce) their new skills.

Because all the skills in the gr. 4 reading curriculum are based in the actual act of reading texts, our reading instruction, this week, has started with some basics.  Our first minilesson focused on how to read independently (what independent reading should look like and sound like) so that readers can best think about what they are reading.  Today’s lesson focused on how readers choose books (look for our exhaustive list tomorrow evening), and tomorrow we will answer a more general question: Why do we read?  All of these help students to build strong fundamental skills that will make them more successful as we kick in with the more advanced skills down the road.

Posted in Class Updates|By Jon Moss