Monday, October 25th, 2010 was National School Library Day. While we have set aside time each day to read silently, on this day we booked ourselves into the school library so we had significant more room to find a cozy spot to read.
Reading usually receives mixed reviews from students. This reaction is often tied into how confident we feel as readers. The good news is practice makes perfect when it comes to reading and if we’re also practicing thinking while reading, this will help us understand what we read even better. When we learn to read and think at the same time, we get “real reading”. The magic word here is schema and we plan on using it for all its worth. Schema is when we intertwine our background knowledge with what we are reading. We can either activate it or build on it. After all, reading is a life skill and our future successes will most definitely require some form of reading from us.
So what are habits of good readers?
- ask questions – sometimes they’ll be answered further on in the text or using other resources, sometimes these won’t … we call these thick and thin questions
- determine what are main ideas and what are supporting details
- use titles, subtitles, and picture captions to gain more information
- make pictures in their mind as they read
- make predictions from clues in pictures and in the text
- make connections between what they are reading and their own experiences, other texts they have read, and the world
- use clues from pictures and text to “read between the lines” and infer the author’s message
We’d love to hear if other schools participate in D.E.A.R. on a regular basis or if you took time out to do something special to recognize National School Library Day. What are your thoughts on reading? What do you do to help make sure you will become a successful reader one day?
image: monkey reading by crazyangelblue released under a CC Attribution – Noncommercial – No Deravtive Works license
