Miller’s Book

This text so far is pretty interesting, Miller has a lot of really good points and great ideas for producing wild readers and helping to excite the readers thus far. In chapter two Miller talks about read-aloud’s and the benefit of them, which included building a community of shared readers, exposing children to different types of genres. So many ideas that she talks about are resonating in my mind, but the part that was the most interesting to me was when she talked about creating book buzz. This was very valuable to me because I feel like there is a very low interest in books and reading in this generation. So the suggestion that Miller gave to encourage reading and kind of make it into a game was way cool to me. This is something that I plan to do in my future class with my students. Miller talks about the students enthusiasm for reading and how making a drawing for books is a great way to create interest, because it give bragging rights and creates a little bit of healthy competition. It might be challenging to talk honestly about abandoning a book with my students like Miller does. I think this might be setting the kids up to just automatically have this idea that the book isn’t worth reading because I said so. I think that I will have to wait until I get to know my students well so that I can get a sense for what books would be great reads for them, so that i do not discourage them to read a book because of my opinion. The thought of talking about abandoning a book is realistic though, because in reality we all do this and one book that we think is interesting might not be that way for another person. I liked the idea that Miller proposes with all the critical thinking questions she talks about with her class about the book she didn’t like. This idea about the challenge is pretty much  the same idea as the creating book buzz idea, and having a little healthy competition to get the class excited about reading is great in my eyes. I am most excited about reading books that excite my class! It will be so great to hear passion and the different views about books we read as a class. I am probably most afraid of trying something new with my class and it becoming a failure. I guess I shouldn’t really be afraid of that because this happens and as teachers we need to be flexible and adjust our lessons based upon what works and what doesn’t work.