Expectations for Reading this Year
ü Read as much as you can, as joyfully as you can.
ü Read at home for at least a half an hour, five days per week.
ü Find Books, authors, subjects, themes, and genres that matter to you, your life, who you are now, and who you might become.
ü Try new books, authors, subjects, purposes, and genres. Expand your knowledge, your experience, and your appreciation of literature.
ü On the “Books to Read” list in your language arts binder, keep a running list of the titles and authors you’d like to try, especially in response to book talks, fishbowls, and recommendations.
ü Prepare a fishbowl presentation once every three weeks about what you noticed and appreciated about a book you’ve finished. Think about the book and consider the writing you read, how the book made you think and feel, what the author did, what worked, what needs more work.
ü Recognize that there are different approaches and different strategies readers can use depending on the type of reading being done. For example, realistic fiction is different from a poem, which is different from a chapter in your history book, which is different from a newspaper editorial.
ü Develop and be able to explain your own criteria for selecting, completing, and abandoning books.
ü Each trimester, establish and work toward significant goals for yourself as a reader.
ü In every reading session, make a decision to engage and respond to what you’re reading with your whole heart and mind. Enter the reading zone and stretch your imagination, live other lives and learn about your own, find prose and poetry so well written it knocks you out, experience and understand problems and feelings you might never know, find stories that make you happy and feed your soul, consider how writers have written and why, acquire their knowledge, ask questions, escape, think, travel, ponder, laugh, cry, love, and grow up.
Source: Atwell, N. (2007) The Reading Zone. New York, NY: Scholastic, Inc.
Last updated: 10/03/2007