Reading for Many Purposes

We are one week into our summer vacation, and I have discovered I have four books going today. Each one fulfills a different purpose:

Words Their Way: Word Study for Phonics, Vocabulary, and Spelling Instruction (Bear, D.R., Invernizzi, M, Templeton, S, & Johnston, F. Pearson, 2008): This book is helping me on two fronts: my work next year teaching middle school language arts, and helping my poor adolescent spellers at home. For years, my kids have told me, "I can't spell", and I have let it go, thinking it would come as they matured. However, at ages 12 and 14, they are still not proficient with some rules of spelling. After being introduced to this book by our elementary literacy coach this year, I bought a copy to experiment with, and my own kids are the guinea pigs this summer (lucky them!). If this seems like a successful approach, I'll try it out with my class this coming school year.

Joey Pigza Swallowed the Key (Gantos, J.): On my quest to update my repertoire of young adult literature, I have been devouring titles from the secondary librarian's Best Books for MS list. Joey Pigza is my favorite so far. I am keeping track of my YA reading on Shelfari.

Time for Meaning: Crafting Literate Lives in Middle and High School (Bomer, R. Heinemann, 1995): OK, I know I already wrote about this professional book. But I'm now 3 chapters into it, and remember why I love it so much. Randy Bomer speaks from the front of the classroom, showing his teaching and reflecting as he goes. He makes mistakes, thinks about them, fixes them, and explains his process. Throughout, he keeps the goal of helping adolescents use print to make meaning of their lives central to everything he does. He keeps me focused on the big picture even as I consider adding pieces like word study to my language arts class.

Beatrice and Virgil (Martel, Y.): I have to keep feeding my adult pleasure reading life, even though I am busy reading other things too. Making time for good quality literature is one of my life pleasures. Besides, I have to choose a book for my adult Book Club to read this coming year!

Along with these books, I am also reading blogs and reviews and facebook posts and emails and Newsweek, each for their own distinct purposes. When I hear from students, "I don't read" or "I don't like to read" or "I'm not a reader", I need to remember all the different reading I do in my life, and try to help those students recognize that they, indeed, are readers, even if they don't pick up a novel to read for fun at night. I hope that I can help them match up the kind of reading they like to do with the texts that can build their reading skills and their sense of being a lifelong reader.