Creating Readers

D.M.

The words that Donalyn Miller choses to describe her student readers are powerful.  She chooses to describe her week readers as “Developing” or “Dormant”.  In this way she helps them to understand that they have potential to become strong readers and that though they cannot read at the same level as others, they are learning to do so.   While reading this article I am reminded that we as future teachers can benefit our students by sharing our struggles with students. In my past shared my struggles with children in relation to math and also when helping them to build friendships.  Now I see how sharing about our past hurdles we experienced when we were learning to read can be used to strengthen the hope to read in developing and/or dormant readers.

Donalyn Miller allows children the freedom of choice with a genre, I agree with her this is powerful.  I can see how a boy or girl may choose to read different books based on gender or how race may play a major role in a book a child chooses. Giving a student power to “walk away” from a book as she suggests empowers her students.  One other powerful activity is to allow a student to share a few details of a story they have read, I know this absorbs precious time in a jam packed day but they may be offering another child a recommendation to a book that otherwise would not get made.

Shared Reading is new to me and I fully agree with this concept.  The introduction and pronunciation of new vocabulary is smoothly delivered in shared reading.  This is vital when teaching to a diverse class of students.  In the schools I am currently working in, have ELL students sprinkled in each class along with students who have a wide variety of learning disabilities. Independent reading is difficult for many students and being an active part of the reading experience like Donalyn is in Shared Reading saves time and does not shame a child. She puts herself in the game of reading with her students.  She also has the children journal much like what we are doing here in WordPress.  Having my fellow classmates here has been helpful to me as an adult.  I can see how a written history of reads and written goals would benefit all readers.

I want to leave this post by asking, what tool out of the Creative Readers article will you use in the classroom?