Billie Wiles-Blog #1: Chapter 3

I really enjoyed reading Chapter 3: Share Your Reading Life.  I do this a lot in my classroom.  I talk about what I read at home or what I might have read some place that I found particularly interesting or that I thought might apply to our classroom.  I tell students that I am still taking college classes and still learning and especially that I have homework.  They draw some sense of pleasure knowing that I have to do homework also.

As a student, my third grade teacher read "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" to our class.  She would sit in her rocking chair and we would sit on the floor around her and listen to her read.  I fell in love with reading that year beginning with that book.  It was a combination of the suspense of the book, the vivid vocabulary and picturesque descriptions along with the way she read the book.  She read the book in a way that it seemed to excite you and put you in the book in the setting that Charlie was in at the time.


Every year that I have taught, I have read that book to my class beginning with the first day of school.  Many of the students say that have read the book but I tell them they have not really enjoyed the story until they have read it.  I read the book the way I remember my third grade teacher reading it to us.  My book is falling apart.  I have to hold it together with a rubber band and I have to hold the pages in the book as I read to keep them from slipping out.  Sometimes, they do fall out and a student will hand it back to me and I carefully put it back in the book.  The students often comment about how worn out my book is and how I must have read it many times to wear it out like it is today. Sometimes one will say that I need to get a new book.  I tell them no!!!  NEVER!!! That I love my ragged torn up book because I know every class I have ever taught has enjoyed THIS book.

The children pick up on my love of the book and the excitement between  the covers and often ask me not to stop reading.  They especially ask me to continue when Charlie has just opened a new candy bar and they want to  know if there is a Golden Ticket in that bar of candy.  I love to see and hear their excitement.

Unfortunately, most of our students don't have a well stocked library at home and have not been read to as a child.  They don't know a lot about picking out books on their level or books that interest them.  I spend a lot of time at the beginning of the year helping them learn how to pick out a good fit book.  Routman offers a few suggestions for choosing a book that is right for a person but I think a student needs additional information about choosing books.  I tell my students that if they read the first page and they don't know five or more words, they have probably chosen a book that is too easy for them.  We go through several helpful hints to choosing a book that is not only interesting but on the right level.  I also tell my students that books are like people.  When you first meet someone, you are just acquaintances.  To become friends, you have to spend time with someone.  I tell them books are the same way.  When you read the book the first time, you are just introducing yourself to the book.  To become friends with the book, you must read it more than once.  Therefore, if it is a picture book, they must read it twice before they take an AR test on it because you must really know a book before you can know it well enough to take a test about it.

I need to keep a log of what I read  I have never kept a log and wish I had because there have been some really good books that I would like to revisit that for which I cannot remember the title or author.  My students do keep a log and as their log fills and they begin a new log, they get excited to see how much they have read.  I have them share their logs with a friend and maybe suggest a book or two that they found particularly interesting.

I feel like my class needs to read a wider variety of genres.  I like the suggested list that was included in the chapter from a brainstormed list made by fifth grade students.  I would like to include such a list in my students reading binders and challenge them to check off all of the genres as they read them and to read at least one book from each genre.


If students see and feel your excitement about reading and gain the value that you place in books in your life, they also get excited about reading.  Every time a student reads a book and scores 70 or higher on the AR test, I tell the class that the student has successfully completed another book and we all give that child a thumbs up.  They love to get a thumbs up and they love to give them!