While resources, websites and apps are helpful tools I am firmly of the belief that it is the attitude and values that you take into the classroom with you that will have the greatest impact on whether you can engage your students in reading.
Here is a compendium of ideas and values shared by the wonderful members of my Twitter PLN that you can use to help your students engage in reading:
- “Set kids free to read”
- “Recognise everything that they read” – e.g. Science text book, comics, the web
- “Make sure kids are aware of all the things they read”
- “Read in front of your students”
- “Read to your students”
- “Read the books you love”
- “Use graphic novels”
- “Use e-books”
- “Take them to the library”
- “Take them to the library regularly”
- “Talk about books in class”
- “Get students to review and recommend books”
- “Drop everything and read”
- “Make time to read”
- “Let them read what they want”
- “Let them sit on the floor and read”
- “Keep spare books in your room – let the students read/borrow them”
- “Encourage them to read about what they are interested in”
- “Show them different ways of picking books”
- “Say its okay if they don’t want to read today – let them research instead – its a type of reading too!”
- “Create a culture of reading”
- “Make sure they can access non-fiction texts”
- “Encourage students to read aloud”
- “Encourage them to read in groups”
- “Don’t forget films!”
- “Create book displays”
- “Get authors in school”
- “Get students to keep reading journals”
- “For some reading needs to be challenging”
- “Expose them to a wide variety of texts”
- “Ask students to buy/download books – ownership helps them value it”
- “Encourage them to explore reading”
- “Be enthusiastic”
- “Don’t be a reading snob”
- “Any text will do! As long as they are reading”
- “Read well – make books come to life”
Thanks to everyone who has contributed to the #edread discussion. I’m not going to post on this topic for a while but I will add resources to the main #edread page as they are shared on Twitter.
Remember you can see all of the tweets here and all of the resources that have been shared here.
Image created using Wordle.
