How Is Reading Digitally More Important Than Ever In many schools, businesses, and homes across the nation, e-books have earned their prominent place on virtual bookshelves. Over the past 20 years, digital reading resources have transformed into the intuitive, customizable, and instantly accessible tech we enjoy today (Attwell 2019). The transition to digital books has also begun in schools as
Why Teachers and Specialists Use Audiobooks in the Classroom Audiobooks provide students with: Accessibility: Audiobooks provide students with equitable access to literature by overcoming barriers in the voice, content, timing, place, and condition in which students are able to engage with their reading. Students can read anytime, anywhere, anyhow! Exposure to Knowledge: Students that struggle to read are often left
Why Reading Communities Work Social distancing requirements have become a mandate that has caused poignant reflection for educators by giving the chance to make new learning of old teaching practices. One of those practices that will take on a new spin this year is reading communities. As student reading groups begin to evolve around our changing times, Glose for Education
Learning new words and making meaning is a cornerstone of ELA education. In an attempt to build up student schema and language mastery, we’ve often relied on class-wide vocabulary lists and word walls, which are usually rotated in and out depending on the communal literature being read, to create learning experiences for our students.
A Reading Scoreboard is basically a spreadsheet that tracks the statistics of reading engagement per student and class. It captures the amount of books students have read and worked through and slices the data into subcategories such as amount of pages read per day or number of annotative comments each student has provided.
Teaching students to annotate text is fundamental in an ELA classroom. As teachers, we equip our students with cognitive skills to break down difficult pieces of literature into understandable parts. When we teach students to annotate, it is usually in the realm of independent reading work, with annotations taken on post-it notes, in the margin of the text, on graphic organizers, or through highlighting using neon markers. As we move en masse into remote learning environments, however, teachers have new, exciting opportunities to develop annotation skills in new, exciting ways.
Without fail, my middle school students will ask me why they need to be writing when I was, in fact, teaching them reading. And without fail, I would tell my middle schoolers, “you will be able to write well the more you read, and you will read well the more you write.” While this may have sounded like typical teacher-speak to them, to me this answer underscored a fundamental truth of literacy in middle and high school – writing is essential to teaching reading. And for me, writing prompts are an essential tool to make writing happen.
In my first year as an ELA teacher, “read a book” became my calling card. When someone finished their assignment early, or feigned the necessity to leave the classroom to ‘get something’ from the office, they expected me to redirect them to “read a book.” My goal was to reinforce to my non-reading 8th graders the importance of reading not just because it was part of the curriculum, or to just pass the time, but because reading was (and is) a pathway to answers throughout our lives.