Indulging in Reading

From the desk of Alice…

I recently trimmed back my social media time in the evenings to make more room for reading for pleasure.  I have a bookshelf full of books that have been on my list for a while and I decided it was time to read them or get rid of them.

Last week, I picked up The Fault in Our Stars by John Green.  My highschool daughter has read this book (more than once) and kept telling me I would love it.  She was right. John Green has a style I fell in love with and his ability to make me laugh and cry on the same page is something I envy.

I know I am a little late to the party celebrating this book, but as I read it I kept thinking about how it felt like an indulgence.  Allowing myself to get lost in a book for fun.

For pleasure.

For absolutely no learning, no self-improvement and no research to remember.
It was heaven.

As I devoured this book, I kept thinking about our readers in our classrooms.

When do they get to read like this?

For independent reading, we need students to devour texts.  We need to have texts that interest readers and allow them time to indulge.  The independent read needs to lead with student interest and should be easy for our readers.  Yes- easy.

In these easy reads, we can put ourselves on cruise control, but still take in the scenery of vocabulary, text structure, plot, new information and sheer enjoyment.  The easy reads encourage automaticity which leads to confidence in reading. And we all know confidence in reading leads to more reading which leads to reading achievement which makes it worth our classtime to consider this.

I encourage you to read something for fun this week.  Indulge.  Then reflect on how you can replicate this experience for your students.

“Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.” ~ John Green, The Fault in Our Stars