Reading in the Wild

My take-away ideas from the Miller text so far are all positive and useful ones. This book gives us future teachers ideas and suggestions on ways to teach reading and activities to go along with these ideas. Such ideas include creating Community Conversations in the classroom and doing this by incorporating read-alouds. The book gives a really good quote by Marilyn Jager Adams that says, “Reading aloud with children is known to be the single most important activity for building the knowledge and skills they will eventually require for learning to read.” Knowing that I want to teach the younger grades, I know how crucial it is to introduce reading in a fun and positive way. However, it does scare me that if I don’t do a good enough job in teaching reading that I might ruin reading for my students all together. I know I never really got excited to read or enjoyed it much until I got older and I don’t know if that’s because of the teachers I had when I was younger or just personal preference but I hope I can thrill my students about reading. Reading gives us an escape, a world outside of our own and I hope my students can find that as relaxing and exciting as I do.

I really like Miller’s idea of abandoning books and am excited to implement this into my future classroom. Never in my schooling have I ever been able to abandon a book I really didn’t enjoy and was forced to dreadfully really terrible, boring books. Although allowing students to abandon books comes with some complications. I don’t want lazy readers to think they can get out of reading all together by just saying that they disliked the book. As a future teacher I don’t want to force my students to read books that don’t stimulate them at all so I believe we should give students a choice in what they read. Also, by giving them a choice, they are less likely to abandon the book so it will lessen the amount of students dropping books to just simply get out of reading.