When Every Word Counts

In our everyday lives, we don’t pay close attention to every word we read. We read for the gist of things, concentrating more on big ideas than on subtle shades of meaning, new vocabulary, and unusual turns of phrase. This is just as it should be. There’s too much information in the world for us to ponder every bit of it every time we skim the newspaper or scan a web page.

But there are times when close reading is required. When we’re following directions, signing a contract, or taking a test that holds the key to our future, every word matters. Reading closely also makes a difference when we’re learning to read. If we gloss over unfamiliar words, we never get the chance to learn them. If we ignore complex logic, we miss the opportunity to improve our own. If we skip the hardest parts of great novels and poems, we undermine the purpose of reading them in the first place.

This is why teaching close reading is so important to me. When I conference with individual readers, or teach a lesson to the class, I encourage kids to use every strategy they have to wring out every last drop of meaning from every word they encounter.

We can work on close reading using any text, but for formal lessons, I often pull out short pieces I’ve written myself specifically for the purpose of giving kids a challenge:

Test Anxiety
When she saw her score, she became depressed. Or was she elated? After all, her strategy had been successful. But this was beyond expectations. People would be suspicious. There would only be rumors at first, just speculation. She rubbed the inside of her forearm. She hadn’t even bothered to wash it off yet. And if she chose to keep it always as a trophy or a talisman, could anyone decipher the code? A present from her parents, she had told everyone; an easy way to obscure her ruse. But now, with perfection staring back at her from the page, she surmised that her plan had worked too well. She cast a furtive glance around the room to spy on the scores of others. The difference would be telling. She timidly approached the teacher’s desk, feigned illness, and dashed to the bathroom.

The first thing we do is read it out loud together. I love choral reading because it gives me a chance to show kids how to read carefully. We try to maintain a slow and steady speed. The kids usually run ahead but I hold them back by focusing their attention on phrasing like this:

When she saw her score,
she became depressed.
Or was she elated?
After all,
her strategy had been successful.
But this was beyond expectations.
People would be suspicious.
There would only be rumors at first,
just speculation.

When we’ve read the passage once through, I ask them to tell me what it’s about in a single sentence. We usually come up with something like this: “It’s about a girl who cheated on a test and now she feels bad about what she did.”

This one-sentence summary is crucial to our close reading process because it establishes the context. In close reading, kids will be depending on context clues to make inferences. But often, they don’t have an explicit understanding of it. A simple summary, even if it isn’t entirely correct, makes all the difference.

Once we understand the context of the whole, we can begin to work on the parts. I like to work sentence-by-sentence. Specifically, I want kids to go back to the first sentence and tell me if there are any words, phrases, or ideas we need to talk about in order to have a more complete understanding.

When she saw her score, she became depressed.

In the first sentence, we need to talk about two things: What does “depressed” mean? And why did the girl become that way when saw her score? If there’s not enough information yet, we’ll read one sentence further.

Or was she elated?

Now we’ve got another question to answer: What does “elated” mean?

From the way the sentences sound, “depressed” and “elated” are probably opposites. So now I’ll have the kids make some guesses, or inferences, about what “depressed” means. It’s a word they think they all know but in the process of defining it, we’re likely to discover that the meaning is a little richer than they might have thought. Typical guesses include: “sad”, “tired”, “angry”, “hurt”. Now I’ll ask kids to substitute their guesses back into the sentence to see which ones do the best job of clarifying the meaning. In this case, “sad” and “hurt” fit the bill.

We continue this process for every sentence in the passage. When we finish, we retell the passage using our own words and some of the extra information we’ve picked up about it along the way. I also try to pose so-called “big questions” that apply to their entire passage. These are typically open-ended questions with no right or wrong answer. All I require is that kids support their answers by citing the text. For “Test Anxiety”, I ask questions like, “What is the girl running off to do?” or “What is she most afraid of?” or “What do you think will happen in the near future?”

There are several things I like to point out to kids about close reading:

• We don’t have to know the exact meanings of words. It’s hard to say what the exact meaning of a single word is. Even with a dictionary, it isn’t always possible to come up with a definition that exactly matches the way a word is used in context. A good guess, or two, is a great way to figure things out, and to learn new words at the same time.

• Meanings change in context. The word “depressed” means one thing to a girl getting back a test and another thing entirely to a psychologist diagnosing a patient. It’s important to know what words mean, but what they mean is often determined as much by context as by the word itself.

• More guesses mean more meaning. If we stop after making the single guess, “sad”, we know we get most of the meaning. But doesn’t the last guess, “hurt”, give us just a little bit more of an understanding of how this girl feels? Usually, the meaning of a word in context will be defined by the overlap of several guesses. Making several guesses, as opposed to just one, also insulates readers from the problem of guessing wrong. The reader in this situation who goes with “tired” or “angry” makes a mistake. But with the other words to choose from, it’s easy to see which fits better in context.

• Wrong guesses are not a problem. Because we’re always going back to see how our guesses fit with the sentence, we’ll be able to catch most of the errors we make. Even a wrong guess helps us improve our comprehension because we’re discovering words that aren’t part of the solution and we’re revisiting the context one more time to evaluate them. Knowing that something doesn’t make sense is often the precursor to discovering something else that does.

This process of identifying important words and attempting to define them in context leads us to an important discovery about close reading. Close reading depends on the coordination of three essential reading strategies:

• Question. We start with questions. What’s confusing? What’s important? What does that word mean? What don’t we understand? Close reading begins with any question we might have about the text as we move through it sentence-by-sentence. Nothing happens until we ask a question.

• Infer. Every answer we offer is an inference. We hope the answers are right, of course, but often they’re not. Even a relatively simple word like “depressed” can only be understood in context as the overlap of two good guesses.

• Clarify. Every answer, or inference, has to be checked out. Specifically, we hope to use our inference to understand more about what we’re reading. The goal is that our understanding becomes clearer as we go along. If it doesn’t, we throw out our inference, go back to our question, and start the process over again.

Question, infer, clarify; question, infer, clarify. To get the most out of a challenging text, readers have to move through this circular process over and over.

It’s important for me to practice close often with kids because I need them to internalize the question-infer-clarify process. Breakdowns in comprehension can almost always be traced back to readers leaving out one or more of the three steps.

• Start with a question. If readers neglect to question, they never dig deeply into a text to begin with. All they have is their surface comprehension, and even when this is very good, it isn’t as deep as what they might otherwise be able to achieve if they would simply start by asking a question or two.

• Just take a guess. I can often get kids to ask questions but many won’t make inferences. They tell me that they’re worried about getting something wrong. As we’ve just discussed, even wrong answers can be helpful. So I have to help kids break the habit of not making guesses. The tendency to think or say, “I don’t know”, as the default response is probably the single most serious impediment to kids improving their reading comprehension.

• Try to make things clearer. Questions and inferences get the ball rolling but they don’t finish the job. For every question asked and inference made, we have to go back and attempt to use what we’ve just come up with to clarify our understanding. Without this step, our comprehension can actually degrade as we pile up incorrect inferences and begin to confuse ourselves.

As kids move through this process, I like them to mark up the text they’re reading with a record of their comprehension. There are several ways we can do this:

• On the board. I often start by copying the passage double-spaced on the board. As we work the text together, I note the group’s questions, inferences, and clarifications in the margins and in between the lines. Working as a group, there’s lots of comprehension to write down. Kids are often impressed with the volume of their own thinking and the fact that, in the end, our understanding of the passage is longer than the passage itself.

• Printed handout. When I want kids to work on their own, I print out the passage, double-spaced, and centered on a page so there’s lots of room to write all around it. Kids record their comprehension individually and then we share our results.

• Copy double-spaced in journal. Though the kids like to complain about it, it’s not a big deal for me to ask them to copy a passage into their reading journals. I ask them to do this regularly using a passage from the book they’re reading, so they get used to it pretty quickly.

Teaching kids to mark up their text is a big part of what makes this such a valuable activity. For the kids, it helps them see how much work there is to be done on a single line or paragraph. For me, it provides an excellent assessment of how kids are thinking while they read. Short of having a conference and trying to pry open their heads to see what’s inside, reviewing their understanding in the margins and in between the lines of a close reading passage gives me the best vantage point on their comprehension that I can imagine.

Close reading is an exercise I try to do often with kids. I also reinforce it when we conference or share. At first, it’s tedious and time consuming; the first time we do it, it might take 30 minutes or more. But once we get the hang of it, we can close read a short passage in 5-10 minutes.

If I want kids to become better readers I have to challenge them with tougher texts. But I also have to give them a reliable process for working through those texts. Close reading with question-infer-clarify and text mark-up is the best activity I’ve come across. It helps kids internalize important reading behaviors, it helps them develop their vocabulary, and it helps them improve their stamina for critical reading. Perhaps best of all, it gives low readers a set of tools they can use when faced with texts above their reading level.

Though I’m inclined to introduce close reading with fiction in Language Arts, it works for informational texts in the content areas as well. The question-infer-clarify process is perfect for working through a textbook chapter, and the notes kids generate reinforce their comprehension and often aid in answering end-of-chapter questions. Close reading is also an essential skill for maximizing student performance on high stakes state tests.

Key Ideas That Ground Me in My Teaching

Teachers are under great pressure to change their teaching these days. Hardly a year goes by that isn’t filled with new curriculum, new methods, and new requirements delivered as new mandates to which teachers must conform. Because reading is the first “r”, the change here has been particularly sweeping, so much so that it’s easy for some of us to feel swept off our feet into styles of teaching we’re not comfortable with.

Truth is, districts can tell teachers what and how to teach, and more are doing exactly that. So each of us has to have a way of connecting with what’s most important to us in our practice and infusing our core beliefs into whatever methods we are asked to use.

Over the years, I’ve come up with seven ideas that I’ve tried to make a consistent part of my teaching:

• Teach kids how to make their own good choices.
• Give kids real things to do.
• Offer practical, reusable strategies when kids get stuck.
• Surround kids with models of quality.
• Help kids learn to evaluate themselves and set goals for their own improvement.
• Treat kids as individuals striving to reach their full potential.
• Make the work meaningful and relevant to kids’ lives.

In a list like this, these ideas may not seem very powerful. But with each year that passes, I realize that they’ve become a lifeline for me, reconnecting me during hard and confusing times with my purpose as an educator and with the inspiration that drew me to working with kids in the first place.

Each of these ideas informs my practice in specific ways and each can be applied to reading regardless of the grade level or subject area in which I’m working:

• Teach kids how to make their own good choices. The first choice in reading is what to read. Choice is the key to motivation, to ownership, and to the essential goal of making sure kids are reading regularly at their independent reading level. Choice also makes reading with a class full of readers more interesting. When everyone is reading the same text, the same way, at the same time, individual readers lose the opportunity to make the individual discoveries that are so crucial to getting excited about reading and to becoming good at it. I want kids to have choices in their reading so they can learn to become choosy readers.

• Give kids real things to do. If we want kids to develop real-world reading skills, they have to be engaged in real-world reading activities. I want kids to have real discussions about books just like adult readers do. I don’t want them to write book reports, I want them to write book reviews just like the ones adults publish online and in newspapers and magazines. I also want kids to read in their interest areas. In order for kids to learn about informational texts, they have to read them for authentic purposes. Just like adults, I want kids to read not only for entertainment but also to solve real problems and to explore important issues in their lives.

• Offer practical, reusable strategies when kids get stuck. I want the bulk of my instruction to focus on techniques that help readers solve the most common problems they encounter when they read. To do that, I have to offer much of my instruction one-on-one through conferencing as kids are reading in authentic self-selected texts. I want to emphasize the process of reading so kids can master techniques that will serve them in any reading situation they encounter.

• Surround kids with models of quality. I want to model good reading in front of students as often as I can. I want them to hear me reading well and to follow my thinking about how I read as I share my thoughts out loud. I want to give them a language to describe good reading based on six qualities: speed, accuracy, phrasing, expression, understanding, and thinking. And I want them to listen critically but constructively to each other as they read and express their understanding of the texts they encounter. Finally, I want them to read good books and other high quality texts of all kinds. I want them to develop a sense of what they consider to be good writing, and I want them to have their own lists of favorite books, authors, and genres.

• Help kids learn to evaluate themselves and set goals for their own improvement. With each year that goes by, I become more convinced that self-assessment is the single most valuable skill I can teach. Kids who can evaluate themselves and set goals for their own improvement are more engaged in their learning and more likely to make progress regardless of the instruction they receive. I want kids to internalize our criteria for good reading and be able to apply it to themselves as well as I can. I want them to have high expectations for their performance that go far beyond minimum state requirements. Most of all, I want them to work with me, not as students, but as partners in their own learning, taking responsibility for the kinds of readers they want to become.

• Treat kids as individuals striving to reach their full potential. With so much emphasis on standardized tests these days, it’s easy to get caught up in the notion that our goal is to help every student develop the same minimal level of skills. But rather than working for minimum competency, I want to work for maximum potential. I don’t want the same learning goals for each student; I want individualized learning goals that support the notion of every child being the best he or she can be. Far from being standardized, I want my instruction to be as individualized and as differentiated as possible. Different readers need to read different texts, they need to learn different strategies, and they need to pursue different projects. The best way to make sure we leave no child behind is to push all children ahead as far and as fast as they will go.

• Make the work meaningful and relevant to kids’ lives. Reading is, first and foremost, the act of getting meaning from text. In order for kids to learn to read, their texts must be meaningful to them. No teacher, or curriculum, or entity can know better than the readers themselves what texts will be meaningful and relevant to their lives. The work kids do around reading must make sense to them as a natural extension of who they are and why they read. Why do we give book talks and write book reviews? Because we want other readers to learn about the books we’ve read. Why do we choose the books we choose? Because we like certain authors or because we want to learn about certain subjects. If we want kids to become lifelong readers, we have to start by making reading a part of their lives.

When I think about how to teach reading, these seven ideas form the foundation of my approach. I can’t realize all of them in every teaching situation. Sometimes the environment in which I’m working is too restrictive. But when I keep these ideas in mind, and when I work consistently to bring my teaching in line with them to the greatest degree possible, I know I provide kids with a valuable reading experience.

With all the change going on around us these days, it’s easy to lose our way. Before we know it, we’re teaching things we don’t believe in to kids who don’t care. That’s when our teaching suffers and our work becomes laborious. Reading is a deeply personal endeavor. If we teach it without a strong connection to our experience as readers or to our values as teachers of reading, our work lacks integrity. We may not be able to teach exactly the way we want to all the time. But when we ground our teaching of reading in our own personal curriculum, we create for our students an experience that has the power to inspire them as much as reading inspires us.

Helping Kids Connect Real-Life Reading with Real-Life Learning

As part of our non-fiction stuff this semester I brought in six NCAA football coaches' contracts. All the boys thought that was the coolest thing; everyone seemed to enjoy actually reading something "real". That's what they said: the contract was real, not like reading articles or biographies or editorials. When I asked them what those things were, they said "fluffy". It was a very interesting conversation.

In their history class they're heading towards WWII, so today I read to them from "Farewell to Manzanar" about Japanese internment camps and then they read a couple journals from Japanese internees. They didn't know anything like that had happened in the US.

So then I asked them if those pieces were real or fluff. They said real, but it's history stuff and that doesn't really count because we read something that linked to what they were doing in history. Come hell or high water I'm going to get them to see how it's all connected.

This semester I asked that they start off with a non-fiction book. I think 80% of them had never read a non-fiction book. Our library has a HUGE non-fiction section there isn't a subject or person they don't have a book on - we spent forever in the library with they looked for a book. They shared today and I think they were surprised how much they are "getting into" their books. As we were leaving on of my boys, who really struggles came up to me and said, "Mrs. Forman, you tricked us."

"What do you mean Jay?"

"Well, we aren't just reading, we're learning stuff too and that's not fair."

"What's not fair?"

"Well, Courtney is learning about inter-racial relationships, you know she's dating Zach, and JP is learning a lot about that Crips leader. Tasha is all happy about learning about emotions. Everyone's learning something. But you didn't tell us that would happen. That's not fair."

"Jay, are you learning something?"

"Oh yea!" he said. Then he talked about all this mythology stuff.

It's been fun!

Seven Simple Practices That Accelerate Student Progress

I was listening to a news story on the radio about how schools are helping struggling readers. One school had taken a group of low-reading 9th graders and put them into a special class. Reading levels in the group ranged from 3rd to 5th grade and, predictably, many kids admitted they really didn’t like to read. As the teacher called the class together to begin the lesson, something caught my attention. Everyone in the class was reading To Kill a Mockingbird.

Now, the last time I checked, To Kill a Mockingbird was well above the reading level of kids with 3rd-5th grade abilities. So how were these kids going to improve when the only book they were reading was a book they couldn’t read? How many kids would be likely to do extra reading on their own at home? How many kids would improve their reading fluency? How many would increase their stamina for long sustained reading sessions? How many would become hooked on books as a result of spending several weeks on a text that might be several years above their independent reading level?

If this were an oddity, I wouldn’t bother mentioning it. But I see it in almost every school I visit. The whole class novel is the sacred cow of American reading instruction, so sacred, in fact, that we can’t imagine any other way for kids to become better readers. And yet, whole class reading is the structure that is least likely to help a classroom full of kids raise their reading levels in a hurry.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not against the classics. To Kill a Mockingbird is a terrific book. It’s beautifully written, the story is well told, kids can relate to it, and it covers important issues that still resonate with us today. It’s most often taught in middle or early high school and most of the grade level listings put place it somewhere between 7th and 9th grade. It’s a great book for teenagers but not if they read at pre-teen levels.

This kind of instruction goes on everywhere in our schools, not just in special reading classes and not just at the high school level. For the sake of tradition, or convenience, or a teacher’s personal preference, or merely to follow a requirement, teachers routinely pick whole class texts when they know that many of their students can’t read them. When I see this in a classroom where I’m consulting, I often ask the teacher how it works. If the kids can’t read the book, how do they learn about it? Teachers tell me that they read the book to the kids, that they play a CD of someone reading it, or that they show the movie. These are all nice things to do but none of them helps kids learn to read.

All across our country, we have literally millions of kids who are not proficient readers. If we extrapolate results from the most recent reading test of the National Assessment of Education Progress, the number of kids reading below grade level could be as high as 20-25 million. Clearly, there’s some catching up to be done. And setting up special classes for low readers isn’t necessarily a bad idea. But making them read the same book when it’s well above their reading level is.

Even if we don’t teach a special reading class, we all encounter kids who are far behind in reading. Think about how hard school is for them. Almost every class they take requires some reading and virtually everything their teachers give them is above their reading level. When I see kids that are two, three, or more years behind, I know I have to be very focused in the way I help them. And what I need to be focused on is raising their reading level—fast. To do that as quickly as possible, I focus on the following practices:

• Spend most of our time reading individual, student-selected, “just right” books. Kids have to read their own books because I want each of them reading at their independent reading level. That’s the fastest way for them to improve and the best way to make sure they are motivated to do the hard work that becoming a better reader requires. When kids spend most of their time reading texts that are too hard for them, they develop bad habits that can actually leave them even farther behind. Teaching kids how to choose their own “just right” books is also the best way to motivate readers who probably don’t like to read. There are many ways to define what a “just right” book is, so I start with something simple: a “just right” book is a book you like and can read well.

• Focus on fluency. The key to raising reading levels is improving reading fluency. Much of my instruction, therefore, will focus on reading rate, phrasing, and expression. I’ll support kids in this by providing them with more efficient decoding strategies and by showing them how and when to reread passages they may at first have difficulty with. I’ll model fluent reading extensively and give them lots of scaffolded practice through choral reading.

• Provide individualized instruction while kids are reading. The best time to help kids improve their reading skills is while they’re in the act of reading. Even though I’ll give plenty of whole class lessons, most of my instruction will come during individual conferences with kids while they’re reading in self-selected texts at their independent reading levels. This gives me the best vantage point for assessing their needs. It also gives them the best opportunity to apply the strategies I’m teaching while I’m sitting beside them ready to help.

• Teach questioning as the most important strategy. Struggling readers aren’t in the habit of paying close attention to what they read. They read the words they can read, skip the words they can’t, and rely on skills unrelated to decoding text to maintain minimal levels of comprehension. It’s counterproductive to bombard them with a huge list of strategies. But if I can teach them how to question—the easiest and most natural comprehension strategy—they’ll become instantly more engaged in their reading in ways that will help them fill the gaps in their understanding. Questioning leads naturally to making inferences and inferences lead naturally to clarifying understanding. Questioning also generates predictions and connections. It’s the foundation of almost all other comprehension strategies, it can be initiated by any level of reader in any text, and it’s a perfect tool for kids whose comprehension is often incomplete or unclear.

• Use journaling to capture comprehension. Kids who struggle with reading also struggle to articulate their understanding of what they read. They often try to read intuitively depending more on non-text elements than on textual details. As a result, they may have trouble recalling finer points in discussions or on tests. Journaling gives kids the time and the freedom they need to express their comprehension in more detail. With a journal, they can read a short passage, write about it, read over what they’ve written, and compare it with what they’ve read. Looking across a set of entries made over time, I can also see patterns in their comprehension that help me assess their strengths and weaknesses.

• Use book talks as a culminating event. After kids finish a book, the best thing they can do is talk about it with other readers just like them. In a book talk, I instruct students to briefly summarize what they’ve read, to tell their audience about their favorite parts, to relate the book to other books kids may have read, and to make general recommendations about who might like to read it. Then we turn the tables and let the audience ask questions. As the reader answers, we learn more about the book and about the reader. Book talks stimulate interest within our reading community, they give kids a way to interact socially around books, they increase the number and kinds of books kids are exposed to, and they challenge both the person giving the talk and other readers in the audience to improve their thinking about books.

• Make sure kids read regularly and in high volume. Kids who are behind need to do more to catch up. I want kids to read every day for a sustained period of time in class and again later on at home. Depending on their reading level, I want kids to complete between 20 (if they’re in high school) and 50 (if they’re in the primary grades) books a year. More than anything, I want kids to develop the habit of reading. I also want them to experience, probably for the first time in their lives, what it feels like to have read many books and learned about many others.

In my review of reading practices, I find that programs for struggling readers are almost mirror opposites of what I’m suggesting here. I also know from my consulting work that even the suggestion of practices like these is enough to get me banished from a district. And yet the biggest successes I’ve seen in schools around the country come out of classrooms structured along these lines.

What keeps us from setting up our reading classrooms like this? In most cases, it’s just past traditions and present-day politics. Everyone takes reading very seriously. No subject is more controlled, no information is more guarded than the way a school teaches reading. When teachers are told to teach reading a certain way, they do it, or else. And that means that reading instruction doesn’t change much. The basic tradition of a whole class of kids reading the same book, the same way, at the same time (whether most of them can read it or not) remains essentially unaltered from an era when children learned to read by memorizing the Bible.

If the dominant paradigm for reading instruction in America is the whole class novel, and millions of kids remain below grade level despite the pressures of high stakes testing, unprecedented federal funding, and a decade of standards-based reform, I think it would be wise to look into other classroom structures for helping kids learn to read. Personally, I favor individual reading of “just right” books with frequent teacher conferencing and an instructional emphasis on fluency. It’s not a complicated recipe, every element of it is research-based, and it certainly can’t produce worse results than what we’ve been doing all along.

Helping Kids Decode Unfamiliar Words

When readers are just starting out, they spend a lot of time and effort trying to decode words. This is not an easy task. Turning symbols into sounds and sounds into words involves a lot of guess work. Sometimes, after all that trial and error, readers are left only with errors that try their patience.

Whether the reader is a 5-year-old struggling with his first picture book or a 15-year-old struggling with his second language, I have to provide the same kind of help. I have to show kids logical ways of breaking unfamiliar words into decodable parts they can quickly reassemble into something that makes sense.

As accomplished readers, we swallow words whole. Beginning readers try to do this, too. But many of the words they encounter are unfamiliar to them. When this happens, reading whole words doesn’t work too well. Unfortunately, neither does a random approach to sounding words out. Kids make guesses often based on just one or two letters. In many cases, they may let hard words go entirely, skipping anything they can’t easily figure out.

I don’t want kids spending long periods of time on a single word. But I also don’t want them taking wild guesses or skipping words altogether. Ideally, I’d like kids to make a reasonable attempt to decode all unknown words they encounter through the systematic application of a few simple strategies.

There are many ways to decode unknown words but I want kids to use only a few so they don’t take too much time away from the process of fluent reading. They can use these strategies in any order. Ideally, they’ll move from strategy to strategy very quickly as they puzzle out different parts of a word using different techniques.

Here are the six word solving strategies that I’ve found to be the most helpful:

• Use the first sound. This strategy helps readers make good guesses as long the word they are working with is short. Many single syllable words can be successfully decoded in context using only the first sound. For example, take this sentence: “The boy and his dog ran down the b____.” Reasonable candidates for the last word might be “block” or “beach”. The context supplied by the setting of the story will guide the reader in making the best choice.

• Break off a beginning or an end. Many words start with common prefixes and end with common suffixes. If I teach these in simple spelling and vocabulary lessons, kids will be able to recognize them more easily when they read. Beginnings like “in” or “un” or “re” are easy to figure out. So are endings like “ing” or “er” or “tion”. When readers figure out a meaningful part of a word, the rest of it often pops into their head.

• Look for a word within the word. It’s truly amazing how many words contain other words. For example, the word “within” is made up of “with” and “in”. The word “amazing” contains the words “am” and “zing”. Using words within words often leads to quick solutions.

• Work on the easy parts. Some parts of words are easier to figure out than others. Sp why not start there? Take a word like “university”, for example. It’s easy to pick out three-letter chunks that might help us: “niv”, “ver”, “sit”. Any of these might get us moving in the right direction.

• Use vowel and consonant patterns. The reason some parts of words are easier to figure out than others is because they follow common vowel-consonant patterns. Take the “cvc” pattern, for example. That’s “vowel-consonant-vowel”. We see it in words like “let”, “cat”, “hop”, and “cut”. The great thing about this pattern is that the vowel is almost always short. Another common pattern is “cvvc” or “consonant-vowel-vowel-consonant” which tends to produce long vowel sounds determined by the first vowel as in “team” and “fried”. The last pattern I teach is “vce” or “vowel-consonant-e” which we see in words like “date” and “life”. Vowel sounds are tricky parts of most words and knowing these patterns helps readers begin to sort them out.

• Say the sounds in order. If readers have used the previous strategies to pick out parts of words, they can often finish up their decoding by saying the sounds they hear from left to right in the order in which they occur. Often this produces slightly incorrect pronunciations but this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. A slightly inaccurate pronunciation can quickly be turned into a correct guess when the reader puts the word back into the context of the sentence and their memory for the correct sounds is jogged.

Using just this small set of strategies, it’s possible for readers to figure out even very complex words. But the process won’t work well if they don’t check their efforts against the sentence in which the challenging word occurs. To make sure kids do this, I teach them a three-step process as follows:

• Reread the sentence with the new word. Whenever readers stop on a hard word, I want them to go back to the capital letter and begin again so they can hear the word in context. That’s the only way to know if their guess is correct.

• Think about what makes sense. If the newly decoded word makes sense in the sentence, it’s probably right. If the word doesn’t make sense, it’s probably wrong, and the reader needs to think about trying another decoding strategy.

• Check the letters in your guess. Often, readers will make their guess based on only a few letters in the word. When they reread the sentence, they may discover that the new word isn’t accurate. But it’s often close. The only way to tell how close is to compare the sound of the word they’ve chosen against the actual letters in the word they’re trying to decode. While it’s hard to get kids to do this, it’s one of the best ways for them to improve their phonemic awareness because it requires them to compare a sequence of sounds in their head with a sequence of letters on the page.

There’s always a tension, it seems, between wanting kids to read fluently and wanting them improve their decoding skills and learn new words. We don’t want them to skip all the hard words to maintain a reasonable reading rate. But we don’t want them to stop reading every time they stumble on something new.

Too often, I think, when faced with these quandaries, we opt for compromise. Maybe if they just stopped for a second or two, or if they let only some of the hard words go by. But compromise in this case seems to produce kids who aren’t good at either maintaining their fluency or decoding new words. And what we really need is for kids to be good at both.

To solve this problem, I use a structured approach to repeated reading. I explain to the kids that good reading involves doing three things all at the same but that when we’re learning, we sometimes have to practice them one at a time.

• Reading to decode. Sometimes the focus of our attention is on letters and sounds as we figure out a new word. We usually have to stop, or at least slow down, in our reading to do this.

• Reading to understand. Once we’ve figured out a new word, we often have to back and read the sentence where we find to the beginning of the sentence where we found it and read again. If all goes well, we’ll read up to the new word, read the new word correctly, and continue to the end of the sentence without too much trouble. Then—and only then in many cases—will we have the information we need to understand the author’s ideas.

• Reading to express. Once we know what all the words are, and we’re read again to figure out what all the words mean, we can read the sentence again to make sure we’re saying the words in the best possible way. This may involve making changes in our voice that make our reading sound more like someone talking.

Read once to decode, once to understand, and once more to express. This three-pass approach insures that kids take the time they need to learn new words in context while at the same time getting the comprehension and fluency practice they need to become better readers. Do kids read everything three times? No. But if I work closely with them, they do it enough so that the benefits of improved decoding, comprehension, and fluency accrue without turning reading into a tedious task.

This may seem like a lot of complicated information to teach kids who can barely read. It is. But it’s still worth teaching because it’s exactly the knowledge they need to get better. Fortunately, they don’t have to learn it all at once, and even if they only use a little of it, it will help them improve their reading immensely.

Think about it this way: if we don’t teach them this information, they’ll be working randomly. As time goes by, they’ll make up their own strategies, many of which will be inefficient or just plain wrong. After a year or two of learning to decode words, every kid will have their own repertoire of strategies anyway. Why not make sure they have a small set of good strategies to begin with?

Getting kids to use these strategies begins with teaching them in short lessons. I tend to do this by putting up words on the board that I’m pretty sure the kids will have to struggle with and then walking them through a variety of approaches to figure the words out.

Most of this I accomplish through thinkalouds. For example, let’s say I’m working with kindergarteners and I put up the word “acrobat”. I might solve that out loud as follows: “ac”, “ro”, “bat”. I’ll say those syllable chunks out loud and then I’ll note the strategies I used like this:

ac = a part that’s easy to figure out
ro = a part that’s easy to figure out
bat = a word within a word

Or take a word like “hippopotamus”:

hip = a word within a word
po = a part that’s easy to figure out
pot = a word within a word
am = a word within a word
us = a word within a word

It’s important to note two things. First, I may solve words differently than the kids do. This means there can be different solutions to the same word. As long the kids can explain their logic, I’m happy to have them take another route. Second, breaking words up into smaller pieces tends to change the way those pieces are pronounced. Specifically, parts of words that are not stressed in normal pronunciation will often become stressed when we break words down. This shift in accent is what often accounts for differences in the way words are pronounced. For example, in the word “hippopotamus”, the “a” has a short “u” sound (the schwa sound) because the stress pattern of the word goes like this: HIP-po-PO-ta-mus. But when I isolate the letters “am” to decode the words, I’m likely to pronounce this like the word “am” which uses the short “a” sound. This is why the final strategy of running the sounds together quickly in the order they occur is often the best way to finish up. This tends to smooth out the individual syllables and restore the natural rhythm—and correct pronunciation—to the word.

Surprisingly, it doesn’t take too many practice words with thinkalouds on my part and group attempts at word solving on the kids’ part for everyone to begin getting the hang of it. However, practicing a few words on a few days doesn’t get the job done. As soon as we go over a few strategies, I have to reinforce them in conferences. To do this, I’ll work with kids one-on-one, waiting until they come across an unfamiliar word, and then coaching them through appropriate strategies while they puzzle it out. It’s in the conferencing where the learning really occurs. The lesson is just a way of introducing the techniques I want them to practice. It’s absolutely vital that kids get lots of practice in their own self-selected books. This is the true test because it represents true reading. If the only time kids practice these skills is in workbooks or at the board, they’re unlikely to internalize them as part of their normal reading process.

Finally, to reassure myself that kids are actually using these strategies even when I’m not with them in conferences, I will often ask them to tell me how they figured out a new word. If a kid says, “I don’t know. I just figured it out”, then I know something hasn’t quite clicked. While I can assume the kid is using some set of strategies, I can’t tell which ones. For all I know, the kid could have figured out a word by sheer luck. But when I hear kids describing specific features of a word and the way they used those features to puzzle it out—and I see them using the rereading process I’ve described above to check their efforts—I feel satisfied that they’ve internalized an important set of tools that will improve their reading fluency, allow them to acquire new vocabulary, and increase their enjoyment of reading.

Being Explicit About My Values for Student Success

When I first stared working with kids, I made the mistake of mentally separating them into two groups: the kids I enjoyed teaching and the kids I didn’t. Not surprisingly, my behaviors toward each group only reinforced the stereotype I had created and made it harder for me to be effective with kids in either group. In general, I was too punitive toward the kids I didn’t want to teach and too permissive toward the kids I did.

As embarrassing as it is to admit that I carried around such prejudice, I’m proud to say that I learned good lessons from it. Here are three that I think about often:

• Student behavior, and not ability, is what I react to most strongly. I’m not uncomfortable teaching kids of widely varying abilities in the same class. But I am uncomfortable dealing with many different kinds of behavior, particularly those behaviors that make it hard for me to teach or for kids to learn. It’s not whether kids can do the work that worries me, it’s how they go about doing—or not doing—it.

• All kids can master effective learning behaviors if I make an effort to teach them. I don’t have to treat kids like babies, but I do have to tell them what I expect and, when I want them to act in ways they may not be used to, I have to teach those behaviors as explicit lessons, just like I would teach any other new learning.

• The key for me in helping kids improve their behaviors is treating them like the people I want them to be. Once I lay out my expectations, I have to start by assuming that kids will meet them. If they don’t, my first job is helping them assess their actions and make better choices. This may involve reminders or more practice, but it should never involve punishment. My goal should always be to help them find their way back to the positive behaviors they already know.

Before I can make any of these high-minded ideas come to life, however, I have to know what I’m looking for. Specifically, I have to answer the question, “What kind of readers do I want?” It’s tempting to think of things like, “I want readers who always do what I tell them”, or “I want readers who pass all their tests”, but expectations like this aren’t realistic or useful.

To develop my description of the readers I want, I thought about the kids I really enjoyed teaching and asked myself why I liked working with them so much. I realized that these kids weren’t always the highest readers in class or even the easiest kids to work with. What they all had, however, was a set of qualities that made them better learners and, therefore, more likely to benefit from the teaching I was offering. In the end, I came up with six qualities. The readers I want are passionate, curious, engaged, productive, practical, and aware.

To help all kids embody these qualities, the first thing I have to do is explain them. Here’s what I mean:

• Passionate. I want all kids to love reading, of course. But this never seems to happen even in the best of circumstances. So I tell kids that if they can’t be passionate about reading, they can be passionate around reading. For example, they can be passionate about a particular subject area and do a lot of reading about it. They can be passionate about writing or talking about what they read. I’ve also worked with many kids who started out several years below their grade level but who developed a passion for learning how to be better readers. They might not have always enjoyed the books they had to read. But they thoroughly enjoyed getting through them and on to more challenging texts as the year progressed.

• Curious. In my experience, the most successful readers have always been the most curious readers. These readers are always asking questions, always trying to learn something new. They never seem fully satisfied that what an author says is what an author means. No text is safe from their prying minds. Curious readers tend to choose challenging and sometimes offbeat books. They read many different kinds of text and seem to realize that the “rules of reading” apply equally to all of them. Curious readers are also curious critics. They write interesting book reviews and ask great questions during book talks. They often want to know what other readers are reading and what they think about it.

• Engaged. Kids spend a lot of time reading in class. I also want them to spend a lot of time reading at home. But I worry about this. It’s so easy for a reader just to sit them with a book open and not really do much. It’s also possible for readers to read words but to disengage their mind from thinking too much about the text. I tell students that engaged readers do a lot of thinking while they read, and that I look for evidence of this thinking in their journals, in my conferences with them, and when they share. They know that being engaged does not mean just sitting there quietly turning pages.

• Productive. I want kids to read a lot and I want them to get a lot of good reading done. To help them with this, we keep track of reading rates, pages read, and books read. We can also count the book talks they’ve given, the papers they’ve written about books, and times they’ve given formal readings or made other presentations. While I would never say that quantity is more important than quality in any learning endeavor, the amount of reading kids do makes a huge impact on how they improve. This is because fluency is such a key factor in reading improvement.

• Practical. I want kids to get something useful out of their reading. While I certainly believe in reading for enjoyment, I don’t believe that’s the only reason to read, or that I serve kids well by basing all of their reading on the idea that it will be fun for them. When kids read fiction, I want them to reflect sincerely on important life lessons. I also want them to do a lot of non-fiction reading, particularly as it might relate to interests students might have or topics they are studying in other subject areas. I see no reason why a student can’t read up for a Social Studies report or a science test during Language Arts.

• Aware. It’s kids’ awareness of their reading that I value most of all. When kids realize they aren’t understanding something and take action to improve their comprehension; when kids realize that a book is too easy or too hard for them; when kids see patterns across multiple texts; when kids can tell me how they’ve improved and what they need to work on next—these are the things that tell me they are learning to be better readers.

The qualities I’ve described here won’t show up on a test or in any listing of reading standards. They’re really just my values. But I find that when I’m clear about these values, kids meet more standards and pass more tests.

I suspect that every teacher has a set of values like this around reading. They might not be the same values as mine, but I’m sure they exist. I also suspect that most teachers don’t share their values explicitly with their students. These values come out, of course; no one can hide them completely. But they may not reach kids in as clear and simple a way as possible.

This is a loss.

Reading is such an important thing. In school, we think of it as “The First ‘R’”, the most important subject and the foundation of academic success. But if we don’t share with our kids the kind of readers we want them to be, many may never figure it out. Instead, many are likely to think of themselves as “school” readers, people who only read when forced to do so in school, and then only for a grade or to stay out of trouble.

I think there’s also another good reason for sharing our values around reading with our students: it helps us share a bit of ourselves at the same time. When I list my criteria for the kind of readers I want my students to be, I’m telling them how I see myself as a reader when I’m reading as well as I can. This helps students see me as a model of what a good reader can be.

Teaching Kids to Read is Easier If They’re Already Readers

In an era of testing and standards, it’s easy to develop the mindset that kids aren’t readers until they’ve passed a test that says they are. But I’ve found that kids do better when I can convince them that their readers the minute they step into the classroom—even during their very first days of school.

I love working with kindergarteners at the beginning of the year. Thinking about a complicated skill like reading, and trying to figure out where to start, is exactly the kind of teaching puzzle I thrive on.

I want to start right away with an authentic reading activity. So before the kids arrive, I write a letter on the board. Not a letter of the alphabet, a real letter, from me to the kids, about how I excited I am to be working with them.

If I asked the kids at this moment whether they could read, most would probably say “no” and those that said “yes” probably couldn’t tell me what reading was or how they know they can do it. But in five minutes, after we’ve read this letter together, I’m going to pronounce all of them readers, and I really do expect them to believe me.

I gather the kids up close to the board and we began looking at what I’ve written. We start by asking questions: What is it? Who wrote it? Who is it for? What does the first word say? And so on. What amazes and delights me is that a class of kids who say they can’t read will almost always be able to figure out the following things without too much help from me:

• It’s a letter.
• It has the date at the top.
• The first word is “Dear”.
• The next word is “Kids”.
• The first word of the body is “I”.
• The letter is from me.

The letter is short and written in words we can easily figure out. It usually starts out like this: “Dear Kids, I am so happy to see you today.” It’s maybe two or three sentences long at most, and it ends with the highly predictable closing, “Sincerely, Mr. Peha.”

The form is easily recognizable. The vocabulary is familiar. And it’s short enough to memorize. With just a little work, the kids can read it together from beginning to end with me pointing at the words as they go by. Admittedly, most kids are memorizing words and not decoding them. But everyone participates and, best of all, everyone has a successful experience of reading something real that is meaningful and relevant to their lives.

At the end of the activity, I tell them they’re all readers. I want them to go home and tell their parents they’re readers, too. I don’t want them to have to wait until they’ve learned enough letters or reached a certain level of book. I want them to know they’re readers now because they’ve been engaged in the process of getting meaning from text regardless of how they got that meaning.

The thing about learning is that it’s all in our heads. I want the kids I work with to know that they are readers from the first moment we go to work. Can they read a lot during the first week of kindergarten? No. But they can read something. And as soon as that happens, I want them to know they’re part of the literate world.

Many kids have anxiety around reading. They think they can’t do it and they worry that they never will. They think of themselves as non-readers from the start and they wait for us to confirm their official status with texts that are above their reading level, comprehension questions they don’t understand, and complex assessments that confirm their worst fears about what they don’t know and can’t do. I like to start with what they do know and can do. Why not have them experience some level of reading success on the first day of school? Why not consider kids readers based on the fact that they’re engaged in the process? And why not make sure they consider themselves readers, too?

At issue here is identity, an important concept that often gets lost when we think of teaching as merely a set of objectives, skills, standards, or benchmarks. Identity has a profound impact on learning, especially learning to read. Kids who think of themselves as readers pay attention to text and to reading instruction differently than kids who think they are not readers. In my experience, kids who see themselves as readers learn to read faster and better than those who don’t. Here’s what I’ve noticed about why that’s true:

• Kids who think they are readers have higher expectations of themselves. If kids are readers, they expect to be able to read. It’s not something that is foreign to them or confusing or scary. Reading is natural and normal, even if it’s sometimes hard.

• Kids who think they are readers expect text to make sense. When readers see text, they expect to be able to understand it. When they can’t, they work to figure it out. The expectation that text makes sense helps them reject incorrect assumptions about the ways letters make words and words convey ideas.

• Kids who think they are readers read more. Kids who are readers see reading opportunities all around them. They read signs, they read packaging, they read text on TV. They’re constantly processing text because text is everywhere to be processed and because processing text is what readers do.

• Kids who think they are readers have better attitudes about reading. In the pecking order of school, readers have significantly higher status than non-readers. Since reading is the first “r” and an intense focus of the first years of school, kids who think they are readers have better attitudes about themselves as learners and about learning in general.

• Kids who think they are readers take bigger risks and assume more challenges. Readers like to show off their skills. There are always bigger words and harder books to tackle, and readers volunteer readily for the chance to master them.

• Kids who think they are readers enjoy reading more. Kids know that adults think reading is important and that being a reader is good. Kids who see themselves as readers like to read because it makes them feel good whether they’re good at it or not.

A kid’s sense of identity with regard to reading isn’t just something I think about when I work with kindergarteners. By 3rd or 4th grade, students who see themselves as non-readers may already be years behind, so convincing them that they are readers is a tougher job. Even the lowest kids at this age can easily read a simple letter I might write for them on the board. And they’re no longer so willing to believe me when I tell them they can read—even if they really can. So, for kids at this age, I use a different reader’s identity activity.

This is a listing activity that focuses on reading behaviors. Using myself as a model, I make a list for the kids like this:

As a reader, I...

• Almost always have a book I’m reading.
• Read at night before I fall asleep.
• Read whenever I’m stuck on an airplane or other long trip.
• Read several magazines each month.
• Read novels.
• Read more non-fiction than fiction.
• Read several blogs and websites on a regular basis.
• Read parts of two newspapers each week.
• Read to learn new things and to add skills.
• Re-read something if it doesn’t make sense to me.
• Read to solve important problems in my life.
• Read to stay safe and to follow the law.
• Read text on TV.
• Notice examples of good writing when I read it.
• Read text on my cell phone and other hand-held devices.
• Read signs and other environmental print.
• Read my own writing.
• Talk with other readers about my reading.
• Have favorite authors, favorite genres, and favorite forms.
• Etc....

The list goes on and on. As the kids catch on to what I’m doing, they remind me of other ways I express myself as a reader. Sometimes we come up with 30-40 things. When my list gets that detailed, it’s a pretty good description of my identity as a reader. That’s when I turn it over to the kids and ask them to make their own lists.

In ten years of doing this activity, I’ve never had a kid with a blank list, or even a really short one. Even kids who would describe themselves as non-readers engage in many reading behaviors on a regular basis.

In closing this activity, I point out that anyone with anything on their list is a reader, and that my goal is for everyone to regularly add new reading behaviors to their lists all year long based on things they learn from me. I tell them that this list is their reader’s fingerprint, and that as we work more together, that fingerprint will become bolder and more detailed. I do this activity—and will keep doing it all year long—to help everyone become more conscious of the fact that they are all readers regardless of their level of ability or degree of interest.

When I work with older kids, especially high schoolers, I like to look at reader’s identity more the way adult readers do. Adults think of themselves as readers in terms of what they read in the past and what they read on a regular basis. When I model this activity, I refer to it as my reading career and I tell kids that making lists of what I read is like creating my reading resume.

I often start the reading resume activity by asking kids what they read during the previous year. Many will say they didn’t read anything but we all know they did. If nothing else, most of them at least glanced at the required readings from school. What I’m most interested in finding out is whether or not kids did any reading on their own. In Language Arts, for example, did anyone read novels they chose themselves? Or maybe someone read something on their own for a research project. Did anyone read anything outside of school? Who reads text on the Internet? Etc. Because independent reading is the most common reading adults do, and the most common reading kids will do with me, that’s what I want to learn the most about.

As with the previous activity, where kids write down their reading behaviors, I will want kids to update their reading resumes from time to time as we go through the year. Essentially, this activity will be their final project at the end of each grading period. Like any resume, their reading resume will tell the person reviewing them about their qualifications. In this case, their resume is proof they show me and their parents of their abilities as readers.

No test will directly measure a student’s reading identity. Nor will the concept of identity show up in any list of state learning standards. But I can think of few things that are stronger predictors of a student’s ability to learn to read. The key to helping kids claim their identities as readers is self-assessment. Each of the reading identity activities I use is a self-assessment activity. And throughout the year, self-assessment will be the most common form of assessment we engage in.

While I want kids to take formal testing seriously and to do as well as they can, I don’t want them to define themselves by it. Reading tests vary significantly from the authentic task they are designed to measure and some kids may perform poorly for a variety of reasons only indirectly related to their reading ability.

I’m also aware that kids do a ton of reading outside of Language Arts class. They’re really reading all day long, and ideally I’d like them to be using the same strategies they learn from me whether they’re reading with me or not. Though I can’t prove it, I’ve always had the feeling that kids who see themselves as non-readers or as poor readers shut down when they’re asked to read in many other school and real-life reading situations. If I can help them change this behavior by helping them take ownership of their reader’s identity, I believe I can do more for them than I can through any skill I help them develop or any strategy I teach.

Motivation, Reading Levels, and Book Selection

In general, I’m not a fan of letting kids pick books they can’t read. Letting kids struggle day after day with books two or three years above their reading level is a recipe for fatigue, frustration, and the reinforcement of bad habits. But kids often want to read books they can’t read precisely because they can’t read them. Hard books are cool books, and many kids would rather be cool than literate. So over the years, I’ve developed an approach to dealing with this situation that tries to square kids’ motivations with my instructional goals.

I was working one year with a great bunch of 3rd graders. Whatever they may have lacked in reading skill, they more than made up for in reading enthusiasm. In fact, it seemed not to matter at all to them that they understood little of the books they were attempting to read. They just liked reading.

It took me about a month to convince them that the point of reading was to understand ideas, not just to call out words. As Halloween approached, I felt like we were finally on solid ground: most kids had books at their independent reading level, most were understanding what they were reading, and some were even beginning to experiment with phrasing and expression.

Then Harry Potter came to town.

The librarian announced a spectacular book fair jam packed with the latest titles. The kids couldn’t wait. They saved their allowances, did extra chores, raided piggy banks and college savings accounts. These kids were going to buy some books!

The day after the book fair, I noticed large hard-bound volumes all over the room. Small kids have small desks, and now they were covered by monstrous tomes. One tiny tot couldn’t actually hold the book in his hands to read it. He had to lay it flat instead.

Gone were the tiny transitional chapter books they’d been reading. Junie B. Jones, Magic Treehouse, The Boxcar Children, all had been disappeared by Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.

The kids were more excited than ever about reading. And at first, I was, too. Then I realized something: the kids didn’t want to read their regular books anymore, they only wanted to read Harry Potter. I didn’t know exactly what to do. How do you tell an 8-year old who just spent two month’s allowance on a book that he can’t read it? The answer is, you don’t. At least not right away.

So I let the Harry Potter fans read their new books for a few days. As I conferenced, I tried not to cringe as they mangled unfamiliar names, tripped up on unusual vocabulary, and stumbled through sentences as dense and tangled as fog-shrouded London streets.

I wasn’t surprised that the kids couldn’t read Harry Potter. But I was struck by how much they wanted to read it, and how hard they were willing to work. Several kids who had previously demonstrated reading rates of almost 200 words per minute, were now barely reading five pages a day. And though everyone knew the basic story, few could parse the wonderful details lurking in almost every sentence. I had a vision of kids reading this book for the rest of the year and understanding only the most obvious elements. At the same time, I didn’t think I could get away with banning Harry Potter simply on the grounds that it was well above the kids’ reading levels. So I decided to make a deal with Lord Voldemort.

I told the kids they would have to go back to their original books but that they could continue to read Harry Potter for part of our reading time each day. During “Harry Potter Time”, however, they had to promise to use five strategies:

• Word Breaking. These kids had grown out of sounding out most of their words but now they were back in a text that required a lot of it. We went back over several simple techniques, most involving syllable patterns and word-within-a-word strategies, and they pledged to apply them conscientiously to figure out all the new words they could.

• Phrase Breaking. This strategy involved breaking long sentences into many short phrases. This was the only way most kids could begin to understand the details.

• Questioning. Rather than just decoding their way through, I needed them to start wondering about things that didn’t quite make sense. To do this, I had to get them to actively question their reading. We decided as a group that they would ask at least one question per paragraph unless there was dialog which was easier to understand.

• Inference. While they could ask questions, they didn’t seem to know how to answer them. I told them this was normal and got them into making inferences. We practiced the basic pattern of asking a question and making an inference for the answer by putting paragraphs up on the board, posing questions on the left side, and putting up answers on the right. Sometimes we figured things out, sometimes we didn’t. But we always had a better sense of the passage just by making the effort, and this was the point I wanted to make to them.

• Re-reading. To integrate the results of all the strategies they were trying to use, I told them they had to re-read tougher spots until they were smooth and fluent. This lowered their speed but raised the quality of their reading to a point where I could feel confident that they were reinforcing good habits and not developing bad ones.

If it sounds like I gave them a lot of hard work to do, that’s because I did. Initially, I thought they wouldn’t do it. I figured they’d give up, go back to their original books, and put Harry Potter away until 5th or 6th grade. Instead, they jumped right in and stuck to it. As a result, they got excellent practice applying good reading strategies to a challenging text for a few minutes every day. And I got a lesson in how good books motivate kids to work harder than I ever thought possible.

Normally, I can’t get very young readers to apply multiple strategies to a challenging text. They get tired. They get bored. And eventually they get frustrated. But when kids really want to read something, even if that something is way above their grade level, I know now that there are ways I can work with them to accommodate their preferences and ensure they have an experience that will make them a better reader at the same time.

I now use that same kind of deal making on a regular basis. Whenever kids pick books that are too hard for them, I identify a strategy or two they need to apply to overcome the gap between their ability and the level of the text. As long as they continue to apply the strategies, they can continue to read the book. If I’m thoughtful about the strategies I choose, and if students use those strategies conscientiously, the reading experience improves and the reader learns new skills. If the reader can’t or won’t apply the strategies, they agree to pick an easier book.

Most kids, when they pick books, make choices that are above their reading level. And they often don’t like it when I ask them to pick something easier. Now I’ve got an approach to mediating that situation more effectively. I’ve also learned when I can let a kid go with a hard book they really love.

I want kids to take risks with their learning. The best thing I think a kid can do in school is volunteer for a challenge. While I don’t want kids reading two or three years above their grade level all the time, I do want them to pick a “challenge” book every once in a while. And when that happens, I want to give each kid the exact set of tools he or she needs to meet it. Striking a deal about using strategies to read effectively in hard texts brings me and the students into an informal learning contract that matches their motivation with my instructional goals. I couldn’t ask for anything better that.

Keeping Summaries Under Control

I want kids to talk and write about what they read. But sometimes, when they give book talks or write book reviews, I feel like it’s déjà vu all over again. Instead of talking about their books, kids regurgitate them in episodes of endless summary. Even when I ask them to stop, they keep piling up details until their summaries are so thick it’s as though they’ve rewritten an entire novel.

Summary has its place, that’s for sure. But kids seem to think that place is everywhere. The challenge is to teach them where and when summary is appropriate, and how to summarize economically so most of their time and energy can go into more rewarding types of reading response.

The reason kids summarize so much is because we ask them to. Summary is a popular way of testing kids’ comprehension. But I’m uncomfortable when class is one big year-long test, so I try not to use summary as a way of assessing how kids read. I used to ban summary summarily. But that was a childish over-reaction. Now I focus on teaching kids how to use summary in the same way readers use it in the world outside of school.

I start with some basic information:

• Summaries have a real purpose; they’re not just tests. People don’t summarize their reading to get a grade or pass a test, they summarize it to help another person understand something in an efficient way. I point out to kids that anyone who really wanted to know about a book could simply read it. They don’t need a reader to retell everything that happens.

• Summaries are as short as possible; don’t retell the entire book. If I ask another reader, “What’s that book about?”, I expect to get no more than a sentence or two in reply. If I’m reading a review, I might appreciate a paragraph. And if I’m studying an intense piece of literary criticism, several paragraphs of summary sprinkled throughout the paper might be appropriate. Summarizers are always trying to get their work done as efficiently as possible. They know that it’s their ideas about the text, and not the text itself, that their audience is most interested in.

• Summaries support other important ideas; they’re not the main idea. If I want to tell you why I liked a certain book, I might have to refer to the plot from time to time just so you’ll know what I’m talking about. But the plot is not the important thing I want to share with you. It’s a set of supporting details I need to present so you’ll understand my message.

• Summaries rarely exist by themselves; they’re usually a part of something else. Summaries almost always exist as part of some larger communication. Summaries play a small but important role as part of any book talk, book review, or critical essay. Publishers use brief summaries as part of their marketing materials. Except for catalog listings and similar references, summaries don’t stand alone.

• How we summarize is determined by why we’re summarizing and who we’re summarizing for. Kids think every summary is the same: tell all you can about a book. But purpose and audience matter more than content. When we summarize, we have to make choices about what to include and what to leave out. Unless we consider our audience and our reason for summarizing, we won’t have good rationale for making those decisions. It is this lack of rationale that lies at the root of kids’ tendency to summarize too much.

This information all well and good. But when it comes to summarizing, it takes more to convince kids to change their ways. So the next thing I do is show them two summary styles.

• The One-Sentence Starter. The most common summary is probably the shortest. In this approach, the summarizer tries to come up with one sentence that captures the essence of the entire book: “Louis Sachar’s Holes is about a group of juvenile delinquents sent to Camp Green Lake, a miserable place where they discover a hundred-year-old secret that may help them find their freedom.” In this type of summary, the summarizer usually alludes to one or more big themes in the story while teasing the reader with a satisfying ending.

• The One-Paragraph Wrap-Up. This is my personal favorite. Not so short that it’s hard to come up with; not so long that I get bored: “Ramona Quimby, Age 8 is about a girl in third grade. She started school with a surprise gift from her dad, only to have it stolen by a boy she called ‘Yard Ape.’ One day at lunch she tried to be cool and show off for her friends by cracking an egg on her head and found herself in a big mess. When flu season hit, she learned how awful it felt to throw up in class. As time goes on, Ramona and her family solve their problems, and learn to be more caring for each other. They also learn to be more considerate for each other when time alone is needed.”

Both of these summary types are short, and that’s the point. To get kids used to writing so little, we create several examples together based on books—or movies or fairy tales or any common narrative—we all know. Creating models of summaries as a group activity forces us to make hard decisions. With a room full of kids making suggestions, we’re bound to have more information than we need. That gives us a chance to talk about what needs to be included and what doesn’t. This is when kids start learning how to summarize.

Summaries can, of course, be longer than a sentence or a paragraph, but I want kids to get the hang of summarizing quickly, so I stick to short models at first. We also discuss other issues like whether or not we can give away the ending and how to create teaser lines that would make a reader curious enough to want to read the entire book.

Now that we have models to look at, it’s helpful if we have some informal criteria to judge our work. This is not a formal rubric per se; just simple tips that remind kids to keep their summaries short and sweet.

• Hit the highlights. Include only the most important aspects of your book in your summary. Don’t worry about all the little things that happen.

• Connect the Dots. Don’t just list things that happen; tell your audience how one thing leads to another.

• Support your important points. What you decide to include in your plot summary should be determined primarily by which parts of the book you plan to comment on and the arguments you plan to make.

• Don’t spoil it. Don’t tell your readers anything about the book that might spoil it for them. After all, the purpose of giving a talk or writing a review is to help readers decide which books they might want to read—not to do the reading for them!

• Set limits. If you’re giving a three-minute book talk, limit your summary to 30 seconds (about 75 words). If you’re writing a book review, limit your summary to no more than 20% of the total length (100 words in a 500-word review).

While I don’t like specifying numbers of pages or numbers of words to make sure kids produce minimum amounts of writing, I love giving them maximums. With summaries, this is one of the most effective things I do. When I tell kids as they give their book talks that summaries can only last 30 seconds, they get very creative about including only the most important elements. The same thing happens when I limit summaries to a single paragraph or 100 words in book reviews. These limits, while artificial, are effective. They’re also consistent with the requirements of real world writing. Rarely do professional writers get minimum word counts. But maximum word counts are common as publishers have to watch how they use their space and how they respect their reader’s attention spans.

Taking a more structured approach to summary has turned something I used to hate into something I now enjoy. What used to be a tedious exercise is now an interesting puzzle: Who can give the best summary in the shortest amount of time or space? Best of all, showing kids how to produce good summaries has gotten them out of the habit of producing bad ones.

Meryem Kennedy sez...

Just like we would expect students to be working on math problems in a math class, we naturally expect students to read in any Language Arts and Reading class. And in a math class we would expect the students "understand" the problem and the solution they are working on. If the student gets the logic behind how a problem is solved, answering any problems anywhere won't be a problem for him.

Reading is no different. Once we can get the students to truly understand the reading process and how their brains help them manipulate the information in any text, it does not matter if they meet these questions in a state test or a final test. They know what reading is supposed to look like: an active interaction between their brain, background, and world view, and the text in front of them. We even encourage students to ASK questions about the reading passage as they read. They become their own testers in a way!

Of course we can supply them with "test vocabulary" but it is not a scary feat. In Read like a Reader strategy we are teaching one of the hardest levels of thinking: inference. Before I taught workshop, I used to shudder before I introduced this term, as if it were an alien word ready to attack my class. But with this technique, it is very natural to introduce inference to any level kids. (I teach Intermediate level ESL English classes.)

If we train students to be readers, this will stick with them a life time. If we teach them only to be "testers" we are robbing them of a precious time they can invest in real life skills. Think about the last time you as an adult had to take a multiple choice reading test as opposed to the last time you read some printed material for various reasons.

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Steve Peha sez...

Meryem touches on a very important concept in her comment: the idea of teaching kids how reading works. There's a difference between teaching reading skills and teaching kids a process for getting meaning out of text. Both of these things are important, but when we help kids develop the self-awareness to understand their own reading process, we give them, as Meryem points out, the tools to read more effectively in any context, not just school or tests.

This is why we want to give kids so much ownership of their reading. And why we ask so much of them in terms of their own self-assessment and goal setting. If all they do is read what we tell them, answer questions on worksheets, and write traditional teacher-directed essays, they may develop certain skills but they may not develop the ultimate skill of learning to apply their abilities in new contexts.

Testing is important. It is a part of life and we want kids to succeed in it. But testing is just one context -- and a narrow context at that. Rather than teaching for testing and hoping kids get some learning for their lives, we do better when we concentrate on real life reading and devote small but focused amounts of our instruction to the unique requirements of reading for tests.

High Expectations That Turn Kids into Readers

When people ask me, “How much should kids read?”, I’m tempted to say things like “a lot”, “as much as they can”, “until their eyeballs fall out!” I don’t say these things, but I’m tempted. It’s not that I want to be flip, it’s just that I think we’re all dancing around the wrong question. Instead of asking “How much should kids read?”, I think we should be asking, “What kind of readers do we want kids to be?”

Reading is pretty darned important. They don’t call it the first “R” for nothing. Most of school after 3rd grade hinges on a kid’s ability to read independently. So does most of life after 16.

The answer to the question of how much kids should read is probably something like, “As much as it takes to make them great readers.” But that’s not the answer people are looking for either.

So here are some numbers:

• When I work with primary age students in grades K-2, kids will typically read 50-100 books a year, though I suspect they read far more than that because their books are so short and we just can’t keep track of them all.

• When I work with intermediate students in grades 3-5, kids will typically read 35-50 books a year. Fifth graders reading above their grade level might find their way into some very long books, especially if they like the fantasy titles that often hook tweens and teens, so their totals might be a little lower. Most fluent third graders can knock out an easy chapter book in less than a week, so 50 books for the school year is not out of reach by any means.

• When I work with middle school students, I expect kids to read 25-30 books a year with avid readers hitting 35 or even 40. Again, since lengths of books vary dramatically at this level, some kids might only read 20 books, or about one every two weeks. Another issue has to do with kids who are reading many years below grade level. It’s not uncommon to find middle schoolers with 2nd and 3rd grade reading abilities. Obviously, they have to read easier, shorter books to start, and this will inflate their total for the year.

• When I work with high school students, I want each student to get through at least 20 books a year, notwithstanding everything I’ve said before about reading levels, lengths of books, and other factors that might affect the final count a few books one way or another.

You can see that what I think about are minimums and ranges. I also think about practical factors like lengths of books and reading levels that will vary greatly from student to student. My goal is to have kids read many books. But it’s not to have every kid read the same books or the same number of books.

“Can I just convert everything to pages so I don’t have to worry about how long the books are?” Some people do this. But I don’t recommend it. For me, it’s not the page count that matters but how often a reader goes through the entire reading process from choosing a book to turning the final page. There are things I can teach students each time they go through the process, things I can’t teach them just because they read a certain number of pages. Still, there are situations where using page counts makes sense. As long as kids are reading, it probably doesn’t make much difference. The quality of a kids’ reading is more important than the quantity.

What I want most of all for kids has nothing to do with how many books or pages they read, or how hard their books are, or what their Lexile score is, or how many Accelerated Reader points they earn. What I want most for kids is to give them the experience of being serious readers.

What’s a serious reader? Here are some of the things I look for:

• Serious readers are always reading something. As soon as they finish one book, they pick another. Really serious readers often have more than one book going at a time. I tell kids that anyone should be able to come up to them at any time and ask, “What are you reading?”, and they should always have an answer.

• Serious readers have strong reading preferences. I want kids to develop strong attachments to certain authors, genres, and subjects. When I ask them at the end of the year which book was their absolute favorite, I want them to have a little trouble answering because they have so many favorite books to choose from. I want them to be able to answer the question, “What kind of reader are you?” with confidence and a long list of titles that show me what they mean.

• Serious readers choose books carefully. I want kids to choose books they like, books they can read, and books that will help them become better readers. I want them to read reviews, listen to their friends’ recommendations during book talks, and consider very seriously the recommendations they get from me, the school librarian, and their parents. I want them to take risks with their choosing. But I also want them to be able to abandon books that aren’t working out. I want them to realize that choosing a book is a commitment of time, energy, and if they’re paying for their books, money.

• Serious readers read regularly. If you want to get really good at something, you have to do it every day. I know that’s not going to happen, but that’s where I start. As a practical matter, I ask for 4-8 hours of reading a week. They’ll get a bit of that time in class but most will come as homework. Is it too much to expect 30 minutes of reading, five days a week? How about an hour on Sunday? I don’t think so.

• Serious readers have a lot to say about what they read. I like spirited book talk. I want kids to write about their books, too. As I often tell them, “I’m more interested in what you think about your book than I am in the book itself.” I want kids sharing every day, giving regular book talks, writing reviews, and expressing a general excitement about reading that looks and sounds like an Oprah’s Book Club episode.

• Serious readers like to hang out with other serious readers. I want kids to bond over books. I want them to form a community of readers. I want them to challenge each other, to root each other on. If someone falls behind on their reading, it’s everyone’s responsibility (mine included) to help them get caught up.

I want kids to take reading seriously. I lay the foundation for this by requiring them to do the kind of reading serious readers do. This is not as onerous as it sounds. Remember, they get to choose their own books. And the main rules for choosing are to pick books they like, books they can read, and books that will help them become better readers. Using a guided choice approach, I direct them to certain types of texts and certain times of the year. But they have wide latitude in the choices they make. I also advise them on their workload. For example, if they’re behind a book or two, The Red Pony might be a better choice than the last Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows or The Fellowship of the Ring. We’ll also make project calendars so we can keep track of due dates, progress, and changes to our schedule that might arise from time to time.

If this still seems like too much to ask of kids, take a look back at my list of “serious reader” criteria. You’ll notice that many of these things are true for many teachers. Education is full of serious readers. So it makes sense to share that value with kids.

But what about reluctant readers? They probably need to read twice as much! But I’ll wait until they’re over their reluctance before upping the ante. The truth of life in the Information Age, however, is that even people who don’t like to read still consume large amounts of text on a regular basis through newspapers, magazines, the Internet, and many other sources. They may not be working through the latest best seller, but reading is part of their regular routine. For most people, in fact, reading is just a habit. And that’s what I want it to be for kids.

Habits are funny things. They’re easy to pick up and hard to put down. Just like a good book. I want kids to pick up the habit of reading. When they break for the holidays, I want them to read a book or two. I want them to read several over the summer. My hope, of course, is that their experience with reading ins school leads them down the path of being lifelong readers. Asking them to read consistently throughout the year allows them to get a feel for what this is like.

So, after all that, how much should kids read? I think the best answer is, “Enough to keep them reading all year long—and for many years to come.”

Meryem Kennedy sez...

Sharing is US! We human beings are made to share. I never thought of this before: Sharing in reading comes naturally to me. Since I started school when I was five, I have always had an audience (poor mom, sisters, pets) to share what I read in books.

Now that I am married, my husband is my captive audience. Almost every evening as I read in my comfy chair, I feel this urge to ask him, who is busy at his computer, "Can I read you something?" Since he is my "captive" audience, he always listens to me from the other side of the living room reading out LOUD a passage from the book and we end up having a conversation, albeit a short one.

Nobody taught me this. How did I know what and when to share? I think you cannot NOT share when some idea or expression in a book moves you. If I can get my students to realize the authenticity of this concept, then I have achieved a crucial goal as a reading teacher.

"Sharing is caring" is one of my students' favorite sayings. There is definitely truth in it when it comes to reading. I cannot think of being selfish when I read. When I come across a well-thought-of idea by an author, I have to make it public so others can enjoy it too. Great ideas are too valuable to be trapped in a book.

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Steve Peha sez...

Meryem brings up a good point when she says, "If I can get my students to realize the authenticity of [sharing their reading], then I have achieved a crucial goal as a reading teacher."

So much of reading is natural to reading teachers. And I think that's why we forget that it isn't natural for many kids. Reading is not really a set of discrete skills; it's a collective habit. This doesn't mean we don't teach skills, but it tells me that in order for kids to acquire them, it helps to acquire the habit of reading first.

Same goes for sharing in reading. As Meryem points out, for a life-long reader like her, sharing reading is just a habit, too -- something she can't avoid even when her "audience" is otherwise occupied.

So the first goal for all of us, I think, is to create a classroom environment where the habits of reading can be acquired. For me, this is grounded in helping kids pick "just right" books and in having them read consistently and voluminously throughout the year.

Meryem Kennedy sez...

Some people are born to party, like some of my students, but I was born to read. I read e-ve-ry-thing. I can't help it. If there is a print somewhere, I have to know what it says.

So in modeling, that is what I do. I share with them my reading journey. I tell them I read every night instead of watching TV. I give book talks and share with them my joy in reading. When we list our books and how many pages we have read so far, some of them choose to challenge how much I read and start competing with me.

It is fun to bring this part of me to class: I love to read. I tell and show my students this passion I have for indulging in other worlds. They see me read and they get it: It is not ABNORMAL for people to like to read.

I model by being who I am: BORN TO READ!

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Steve Peha sez...

I agree with Meryem that the most satisfying part of this kind of teaching is that I get to be myself as a reader.

Many times I've come up with great lessons simply by looking at my own reading, demonstrating it in front of the class, and then figuring out how kids could apply what I had done to their own reading process. I think of this as carrying the curriculum inside of me. As long as I show up to class, my lesson ideas show up with me.

Mostly this means I have to model all the time. Modeling is the most powerful form of teaching, I think. And I think it's especially important in am area like reading where it's not always easy for kids to understand what we want them to do.

The downside of modeling is that I think it takes a long time before we can assess the effect we're having on kids. Reading skills develop slowly, and many are very subtle. In today's world where we're often encouraged to get into rapid cycles of "teach-it-assess-it-teach-it-again", I think we lose sight of how powerful modeling can be when it's done well day after day.

Encouraging Student-Generated Discussion When Nobody Wants to Talk

On evenings when we’re not mesmerized by bad television, my wife and I have family reading night. She has a stack on her side of the bed. I have a stack on mine. Our dog sleeps at the foot, mildly disappointed that we won’t be having treats with TV. Not much happens, but occasionally one of us will turn to the other and say, “Listen to this.” And that’s how sharing in reading begins.

Most of us are familiar with sharing in a writing class. Writers share what they’ve written. Audience members give feedback. The teacher moderates and tosses in a few words of wisdom. That all makes sense. But sharing in reading doesn’t. Readers don’t know what to share. Audience members don’t know how to respond. Teachers don’t know how to moderate.

So the first thing I do to get sharing started in reading is to model the only way I know how to do it. “Listen to this,” I say to the kids. Then I read them a little something and tell them what I think about it and why I think it was worth listening to. After that, I ask for comments or questions by saying something like, “So what do you think?” If I’m lucky, a natural discussion breaks out. If I’m not (and when it comes to sharing in reading, I’m usually not), I begin to teach sharing explicitly.

Kids don’t know what they can share in reading, so I have to tell them. I also have to teach them how to share. This is just another way of looking at reading response. It’s not inherently any harder than teaching kids how to write in a journal. But it’s foreign to them, so I break it down by response type, and I teach different types one at a time over a period of several days.

Different groups of kids develop a knack for sharing different things. But here’s a list of things to share in reading that has worked for me in many different circumstances.

• Share a passage that interests you. This is just like turning to a friend and saying, “Listen to this.” The reader reads the passage and then tells why he or she thinks it’s worth listening to. The audience can ask questions or chime in with their opinions. I’m always surprised by how hard it is for kids to find passages they think other readers should listen to. Initially, most kids just don’t have strong feelings around their reading. So often, when I’m conferencing, I’ll look for good stuff that I can tell a reader is enjoying, and then I’ll the reader to share that with the class to get the ball rolling.

• Share an example of a good writing technique. I do this all the time as a way of introducing writing lessons. So when I get the kids to do it, it’s almost as if I’m turning them into writing teachers. At the beginning, kids can identify good leads and endings, good details, and successful examples of extended description. As time goes by, they learn to talk about things like characterization, metaphor, showing versus telling, and some of the traditional literary terms their college teachers might want them to know.

• Share a passage you’re confused about and ask the audience to help. I wish I could get this to happen more often than it does because it’s almost always a great discussion. Having the entire class work out a tricky passage is just as valuable as a good lesson. And we it comes up in sharing, it’s a lot more spontaneous. Kids rarely want to admit they don’t get something, so I have to model first. They love the fact that I was absolutely mystified by many of the books I was assigned in college, and even though they can’t really figure them out, they get a kick out of trying.

• Share a journal entry. A journal entry is just a piece of writing, so why not share one? Some of the best discussions we have come out of journal entries. I do have one rule for this kind of sharing that is different from sharing in writing: Questions only from the audience, please. Journal entries aren’t intended to be revised and published. So it doesn’t make sense to give the writer feedback on the quality of the writing. But audience members can ask clarifying questions and often these lead to more thinking and more writing on the part of the journal writer.

• Share part of a review you’re working on or some other piece of reading-related writing. This is exactly like sharing in writing. The strange thing is that it never occurs to kids to do it on their own. They’ll gladly share a book review during writing time, but they won’t share the same thing during reading unless I tell them too.

• Share something interesting about an author or share other background information. Believe it or not, some kids read the flyleaf or the “about the author” page. And some authors have personal stories which intersect in interesting ways with their writing. I’m always surprised, and pleasantly so, when kids bring up background information about their books. Most adult readers possess this kind of knowledge, and I think of it as a sign of reading maturity when kids pick it up, too.

• Share how you applied a strategy or the day’s lesson. I’m usually the one who asks them to do this. After I’ve given a lesson, I tell kids that I want them to apply it as soon as they can. Using this as an opportunity for sharing just makes sense. What I like to see most is when a reader applies something from a lesson several days or weeks in the past. It’s always heartening to know that kids are remembering at least a little of what I teach them.

• Share your experience of reading. I tell kids that I want them to think of reading a book as a creative act no less tangible or legitimate than writing one. We all have our ups and downs as we progress. We hit bumps along the way. We get stuck. We solve problems. We have breakthroughs. I hope, as kids get more comfortable with sharing in reading, that they start to share their experience of moving from one end of a book to another.

Reading is, by definition, a lonely pursuit. Even if you count a novel’s cast of characters among your closest literary friends, it’s not as if you can turn to Huck or Hamlet and share your impressions of Twain’s down-home patois or Shakespeare’s timeless sensitivity to the human condition. Hence the need to share what we read with others.

Initially, kids don’t think there is such a thing as reading. But I know there is so I push hard to make it happen. Admittedly, it’s a tough sell. But it’s always worth it. Sharing is the launch pad for almost everything we do. It lets kids try out their voices in preparation for formal readings. It lets them float ideas for book reviews. It lets them listen in on the thinking of other readers. It turns a group of individuals into a community.

Sharing in reading is hard, especially at first. And it requires a lot of teacher modeling. But the hard work pays off in lively discussion, spontaneous lessons, and the tremendous sense of ownership kids develop as a result of initiating and contributing to high-quality interactions around books.