So, I'm not sure about the rest of you, but I found it a bit scary to reach out and talk with other teachers about our practice. I decided to take this opportunity to hopefully get some advice on my practice from the more seasoned professionals out there. The first blog I commented on was The Nerdy Book Club. I immediately was intrigued by the title of this blog for two reasons:
A. I'm Nerdy! and..
B. A book club is something that I'd like to make central to my practice
This blog was a great find. Recently this blog posted on the top 10 ways to get middle school students involved in reading. Here's my response:
"Thank you for the ideas to help students get involved in reading! I'm a new teacher, and one of my goals as a teacher is to hopefully get students to become passionate about reading for fun. Currently I'm working with 11th grade students, and I'm wondering if anyone has had success with using these strategies in a high school classroom? Also, which strategy was the most effective? As a newer teacher I want to incorporate independent reading into my classroom, but I'm not 100% sure how I want to encourage independent reading. I can see a lot of these tactics working well with high school students, but I wanted to see what has worked best with older students.While writing my response I thought my blog comment would be a great opportunity to talk with seasoned teachers and how they can incorporate reading into their classroom. As I stated before, I'm a new teacher, so I thought that asking for advice would be a good place to enter the conversation because I don't have the same amount of classroom experience as the blogger. Currently my post is awaiting approval from the moderator, but I'm really hoping this post will give me the chance to get some great ideas to help me incorporate independent reading into my classroom!
Thank you again for the tips! Your insight is appreciated!"
Feel free to check out the blog! It's a great read!
Nerdy Book Club
I checked out the blog. This came just in time because someone wrote to Dear Prudence today on Washington Post for tips on how to get her son to read. Said son abhors reading, and the writer was at her wit's end. Prudence suggested that the parents find out what else the kid likes to do and have him learn that way.
ReplyDeleteI don't really agree with Prudence on this since it basically means you're giving into the kid's ultimatum. That being said, there are ways around it so that you and the kid aren't butting heads all the time. Which takes me to the RA stuff we did this summer... the authors quoted a teenager who liked to build and repair things, so he was reading instruction manuals and the like all the time. The weird part was that when he was doing this, he said it didn't "count" as reading because it was simply part of something he enjoyed.
I think Nerdy Book Club has some great tips to motivate students to read, especially middle schoolers. They're probably the most difficult bunch!