As someone who doesn’t like reading and often guilty of using the excuse that “I don’t have time to read”, Donalyn Miller somehow manipulated me into wanting to read again. In her book, she has amazing strategies and ideas to make reading fun and enjoyable for kids while they are still learning. Those same strategies are guides to help us future teachers incorporate these ideas in our future classrooms. Edge time is a great strategy she discusses that challenges students to read anywhere anytime, wherever they have a break just grab a book and read. It could be in the car while going practice, in the lobby of a dentist office, literally anywhere. She also discusses other strategies such as reading emergencies, check in/check out system, Reading Itinerary and the list continues. But what I really took away from Miller, aside from the various strategies, is that children should read what interests them. If they aren’t interested in a certain topic they should be forced to read it because that one negative experience can affect how they view reading as a whole.
As a future teacher I know I will probably assign readings to my class, which is something I hate as a kid because once I knew it was required for class I instantly hated it. (It’s like when you find something you like and then your parents like it too, then your like jk I don’t like it anymore). I am excited teach reading and I want to hopefully to allow students to have as much freedom to choose their own books and also implement Millers ideas and strategies into my classroom, so that students will love reading and have a great educated reading experience.
Teaching reading scares me in the sense that I have one chance to either change their thinking about reading whether it be good or bad. I could have a student who loves to read and at the end of the year they could hate reading because of me, but most likely I will get a student that doesn’t like to read and I can change their view of reading in a positive way. I also worry that I will only have a short amount of time to really improve reading levels. All students have different reading levels and I fear that while some students will improve rather quickly, I will struggle in helping those who fall behind improve their reading skills, or that they may fall even further behind on my watch and then they will think of reading as a struggle and grow to hate it.
I’m am positive that Miller has more tricks up her sleeve and I am interested in finding out how I can help students from falling behind in reading and how to engage them and make them excited about reading. As Miller suggests in Reading in the Wild, it all starts with reading something that interests you.
