“There is no such thing as a child who hates to read; there are only children who have not found the right book.” – Frank Serafini
One of my favorite things about teaching has always been helping kids find the right books. I can’t begin to explain the feeling of watching a student get lost in a story. I brought in books I had read at that age, purchased books from the book clubs, shared favorite authors, and asked the other students to recommend books.
I discovered that one of my reluctant readers loved reading the manuals that came with his dad’s power tools, so I introduced him to the work of David Macaulay, starting with Castle. I had another student who loved fairy tales but had read all the traditional ones, so I introduced her to Robin McKinley’s books, starting with Spindle’s End. I had a student who was fascinated with history but really hated reading novels, so I shared a book from my home collection – What If?: The World’s Foremost Military Historians Imagine What Might Have Been. He could pick and choose from topics that spanned thousands of years of world history.
My matches weren’t always successful. I tried connecting a Harry Potter reader to Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising series, thinking the whole magic/good vs. evil theme would interest her. She was gracious enough to read the first three or four chapters before giving the book back to me with a shake of her head.
I read a variety of books aloud, picking genres and authors my students weren’t normally drawn to. I picked books for whole class novels that were written in dialects my kids had never heard, and we had great discussions on idioms, word choice, registers of language, and colloquial speech.
The one thing I never thought about was reading level. Oh, in the back of my head, I was searching for books that matched what I knew about each student, but I didn’t look at lexile scores or grade level equivalencies. I looked for books that would grab their attention and pull them in.
In the last few years, one of my greatest concerns has been the obsession with reading levels, readability, and just right books. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s important to assess where a child is as a reader, but it seems to me that we obsess about it way more than we should.
We label kids with guided reading levels, Accelerated Reader levels, and lexile scores, and, too often, we only let them read within those levels.
We spend time talking about just right books, good fit books, readability, fluency based on how fast one reads, and the Five Finger Rule, but we forget about interest levels, peer influence, and raw desire to read something outside the comfort zone.
Somewhere along the line we have forgotten how important it is to just leave kids alone with books.
This hit me earlier tonight as C started reading You’re a Bad Man Mr. Gum by Andy Stanton. He’s excited about the book because it was a gift from his friend in Ireland, but he asked way more questions than normal.
- Duvet? Is that like a comforter?
- What does he mean by ‘absolute lazer’?
- Wait a minute; you can spell color c-o-l-o-u-r?
- Friendly as toast…that’s funny. Who would call toast friendly?
- Hey rumor is spelled r-u-m-o-u-r in here. Do they do that with all o-r words?
None of these questions kept him from understanding the story, but he did slow down on a few parts – rereading sentences, even reading them out loud so he could hear the words.
By some readability standards, this would not be a just right book for him. On some scales it would be too hard (the rereading would kill his fluency score). By others it would be too easy (he cruised through 40 pages in less than half an hour). He would be on the border using the Five Finger Test because there were words that he had to think about more carefully than normal.
The only test I need? Watching him read, hearing him giggle, and listening to him self-talk his way through the questions.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t give kids guidelines for picking out books. I’m just saying the focus should be on the reader not the rules.
teach from the heart 
For the love of learning; for the love of reading. Wonderful.
Thanks. So much of what we want to know about kids can be learned by building relationships.
Yes! And building relationship and trust must come first.
This is Andy Stanton, the author of ‘Mr Gum’. I stumbled across this post and it’s the most sensible and uplifting thing I’ve read about kids and reading for a long while. (And I’m not just saying that because my book came out it looking pretty good. 😉 )
At last – some sanity on the net. Good one.
Thanks! As a lover of books, I cringe when we try to quantify every little thing about reading. I think it steals the magic.
Oh, and the first thing C did this morning was to pick up ‘Mr. Gum’ and read awhile longer. It was in his backpack for the bus ride as well. 🙂 I have a feeling there are more Mr. Gum books in our future.
Yes, yes, yes! As a practicum pre-teacher I saw what the colored dots and reading levels did to kids’ desire to read and I have hated them ever since. Just this month, I handed my son a book a couple of levels above his ‘comfort’ zone. He read it to me, and called it the book of hard words, all the while laughing and enjoying it. He has devoured all the rest of the series he can get his hands on. Total win.
You are so right! I absolutely cringe when I hear a teacher or school librarian tell a child to put a book back on the shelf because it looks too hard. Besides all of the excellent reasons you give, many children are fortunate to have someone at home who will read aloud to them even after they have learned how to read themselves, and all families should be encouraged to do so.
Very true! I still love reading aloud with my kids – sometimes I read to them, sometimes they read to me. When I taught 5th grade, reading aloud was something the whole class enjoyed as well.
I completely agree. I read well beyond my age level when I was a kid. I I was reading classic English lit when I was a tween. Being restrained to one reading level would have been unutterably boring for me, and my parents recognized that. We made regular trips to the library, and I was able to choose whatever I wanted, from whatever section I wanted. They just wanted me to read.
Of course, I was homeschooled, so this pigeonholing of grades and levels never applied to me. In fact, that pigeonholing was one of the reasons my parents kept me (and my four siblings) out of public school.
Something that might make people put it into perspective is to ask them what they would think if they were only allowed to read certain levels of books. I don’t know any adult out there who doesn’t enjoy the occasional YA read.
I use that argument all the time. I think in our quest to help student move from learning to read to reading to learn, we forgot about reading for fun.
The first thing that came to my mind was, “PREACH.”
I literally laughed out loud when reading about your son’s questions when reading, and I teared up with joy when he made the connection to -or words. How are our kids supposed to make these connections, how are they supposed to GROW, if we keep them on one level instead of pushing them to the next. We also don’t allow our kids to fail. So what if a child picks a book that is too difficult for him? He realizes that he’s not there yet… but that he will be soon. So he puts it back and tries again. I taught 7th grade for two years, and one of those years I taught math. My kids were TERRIFIED to try because they were afraid of making a mistake. It took more than half of a year to convince them that mistakes are okay, that they’re how we learn, and that everyone (even Ms. W.) makes them. We coddle kids too much, and we’re doing them such a disservice.
Sorry for my little tangent, but I think that it all relates. We’re too busy trying to quantify our students. We are obsessed with grading them and giving them a number that we don’t see what they are: little bodies full of potential. And we’re squashing it. It’s why I left teaching after only two years. I couldn’t bear to stay in a system so broken. And until let actual educators be in charge of education, it’ll stay broken.
My first year teaching I started a read aloud that turned out to be totally uninteresting to my class. After a couple of chapters I decided to put it back on the shelf and pick something else. I had a little girl who was just shocked that I could do that. She thought if you checked it out, you had to read it, even if you hated it. It was a valuable lesson for all of us. Reading should be fun. That doesn’t mean it can’t be challenging, but it should be fun. 🙂
I would rather see kids go out and play – reading could always be done later in life.
Perhaps, but if they don’t start reading at an early age, it is almost impossible to get them to like it later in life. Getting my 7th graders to read was like pulling teeth. And why can’t they do both? I did. I played outside after school, then after dinner, I read. The two aren’t mutually exclusive.
Ah, there is a time and place for both. I have watched kids – my students and my own, have as much fun reading as playing outside. Like anything, we have to nurture a love of it. It’s hard to pick some things up later in life. A love of reading begins at an early age. The key is making sure we don’t squash it.
A love for reading doesn’t always start at an early age. I do think that saying that it does, squashes the interest of reading for those finding their footing as a reader at an older age. Students who are older and have not grown up in an environment where reading is heavily promoted, may not have had a great interest in reading in their childhood. Some students interests are piqued when they enter or leave high school. Yes, reading is something that is more feasible when done at a younger age, but it is not always the case. An interest in reading should be nurtured, no matter what age the student.
When I was a kid I read classics like Dracula or Sherlock Holmes(Simplified versions, but still) and I was quite fond of my mom’s Agatha Christie novels as well.
If I had listened to my teachers instead of going hunting in my parents basement, I would have ended up reading ridiculously simple books, because kids at my age didn’t read anything with more than 50 pages. I’m so happy you take an actual interest in developing your students into readers!
My parents, as conservative as they were, never limited what I read. I think figuring out what I liked and didn’t like came from being able to pick up and put down books at will. Not every kid will love the best seller. There are still certain things I have never read that friends of mine absolutely love (The Hobbit, Lord of the Rings). We develop a love of reading by exploring.
Which is why I’m glad my mother had a lesser library in the basement!
I absolutely agree with everything here! My seven-year-old adores books (as do I,) and I never stopped her from exploring books well above her grade level or age level, buying her abridged classics that I can find in the dollar bins at stores. When my five-year-old complained that she didn’t like to read it broke my heart — until the day I learned by accident that it wasn’t that she didn’t like to read, it was that I hadn’t been challenging her enough. I was stuck on the idea that she’s the “younger” child and “only five” and so just never even thought to give her one of her big sister’s books to try out. The day she picked up one of the older-level books and started reading, it suddenly hit me — and now my younger daughter is starting to develop a deep interest in reading too.
We shouldn’t limit kids because of our preconceived notions of what is right for their age or reading interests. I learned that through personal experience and now wholeheartedly encourage other parents to challenge their young readers too!
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Nice article. I am linking to it. I agree with you. I also love how you explained why that book wouldn’t have been a choice your son could have made if he were following “the rules” but how the book got him thinking, asking questions, and excited about reading. I am not a fan of the 5 finger rule. It is limiting and I would go so far as to say harmful, especially for boys.
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I agree with this. In fourth grade, since I was the youngest student in the fourth/fifth/sixth grade mixed classroom, I was assigned to a basal reader which had page after page of things like pictures of fedoras with h_t under it and three vowels, of which one was supposed to circle “a”. Finally I showed it to my mother, who pointed out to the teacher that I was reading my eight-years-older sister’s copy of Little Women! I was switched to the “high” group, where I could read books like My Brother Sam Is Dead. Also on my own, I remember reading Bob, Son of Battle, which is filled with dialect that was very hard to understand, but I loved dog books, so I figured it out. Hand the kid a dictionary (if needed) and let them loose!
I loved My Brother Sam is Dead, and it was one I often used in my 5th grade classroom. It opened up the door to historical fiction for so many kids! If a book draws their interest, they will figure out ways to understand it.