Still Learning to Read

One of the best aspects of working in a year-round school is the opportunity it provides to pause, reflect deeply, and make mid-course corrections. In my third year of teaching fourth grade, after many years in primary and several in staff development, I am finally moving from unconsciously incompetent to consciously incompetent in my 4th grade reading instruction. Although I have talked to parents about “the fourth grade slump,” the (admittedly controversial) difference between learning to read and reading to learn, and the challenging transition to novels, it is only recently that I have truly begun to understand the challenges faced by my fourth grade readers.

I owe many thanks to Franki Sibberson and Karen Szymusiak and their excellent, Still Learning to Read: Teaching Students in Grades 3-6, which has been my course of study this break. I started putting a few of their ideas into practice at the beginning of the school year, but as so often happens, I got distracted. In the interim I have been leading a book study of three other excellent books on teaching reading, none of which pinpoints the precise reading instruction my students need, like Still Learning to Read does.

In fact, close study of their book has led me to suspect that Karen and Franki have been getting to know my readers behind my back. They recognized that book abandonment is the major issue in my classroom. Furthermore, they identified its contributing factors: difficulty keeping track of multiple characters, slow starts in long books, complex structure, hurried and careless book selection, and generally shallow reading. Fortunately for me, Still Learning to Read also offers seeds of lessons to help students overcome these difficulties.

Those lessons will be the basis of my reading instruction for the final 9 weeks of my school year! I’ll keep you posted about how it's going.