Some books present you with the best kind of difficulty: they are full to bursting with literary goodies, so rich that you can’t hope to teach the book for absolutely all it’s worth. Far from scouring the page to figure out something that will excite students and meet your instructional goals, these books require you to practice restraint–to pick out a few gems and leave the rest alone, so as not to belabor the reading. The Girl Who Drank the Moon by Kelly Barnhill is one of those books. I recently digitized my Girl Who Drank the Moon novel study, and was reminded of how well the author used multiple…
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Festina Lente: Hurry Slowly, Reading as Contemplation
This is the seventh in a series of posts about Maryanne Wolf’s Reader, Come Home. You can read the introductory post and find links to other posts in the series here. “To read…we need a certain kind of silence that seems increasingly elusive in our over-networked society…and it is not contemplation we desire but an odd sort of distraction, distraction masquerading as being in the know. In such a landscape, knowledge can’t help but fall prey to illusion, albeit an illusion that is deeply seductive, with it’s promise that speed can lead us to illumination, that it is more important to react that to think deeply…Reading is an act of contemplation…an act…
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How to Facilitate Deep Reading & Foster Biliterate Brains
This is the sixth in a series of posts about Maryanne Wolf’s Reader, Come Home. You can read the introductory post and find links to other posts in the series here. Before getting to Marynne Wolf’s final point in Reader, Come Home, I wanted to share some practical takeaways from the book. These are my own personal takeaways and I’ve divided them into two categories: Examining My Own Reading Life, and Imagining My Children’s Reading Lives Examining My Own Reading Life Since reading Reader, Come Home I’ve been ever more aware of my shallow reading tendencies. I experience continuous partial attention when I read on my phone, and that bleeds over to…
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The Biliterate Brain: The Reading Brain of the Future
This is the fifth in a series of posts about Maryanne Wolf’s Reader, Come Home. You can read the introductory post and find links to other posts in the series here. So we know that deep reading is good and shallow reading is problematic, which begs the question…what do we do? Throw our phones in a lake? Raise our kids off the grid? Maryanne Wolf suggests a more balanced, more livable option. She’s the first to admit that we can’t go back in time, and wouldn’t want to. The goal, according to her, is to maximize the benefits of digital media and minimize the costs. She has suggestions for both the adult…
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What You Need to Know About Digital Media & Shallow Reading
This is the fourth in a series of posts about Maryanne Wolf’s Reader, Come Home. You can read the introductory post and find links to other posts in the series here. “Will the quality of our attention change as we read on mediums that advantage immediacy, dart-quick task switching, and continuous monitoring of distraction, as opposed to the more deliberative focusing of attention?” maryanne wolf, Reader, Come Home In Reader, Come Home, Maryanne Wolf points out that while we may be reading just as much as ever (we may very well be reading more than ever) the quality of our reading has become shallow. She connects this to our inundation with digital…
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Design a FULL Genre Unit that You Can Use Year After Year
Last week I wrote about sketching out a genre unit. Today, we’ll look at the nitty gritty of planning a genre unit. Here are my goals when creating a genre unit: Build on the foundation of the last genre unit during mini lessons (spiral review). Immerse students in the genre by delivering daily read alouds. Give students ways to apply new learning to their independent reading (guided practice). Guided by these goals, my planning revolves around mini lessons, read alouds and guided practice. I want my genre units to be useful year after year, so I plan MORE lessons than any one teacher is likely to need. Having a library…
