Movin on down the road

As I was waking up this morning, I realized that I had spent an aweful long time complaining about my hospital adventure lately and not much time on my favorite topic-self-improvement, professional development. (Translation: What helps a teacher be a better teacher-or person for that matter). So I have decided to got "my train back on track" as one of my kids favorite teacher always says whenever she digresses.

So the benefit of being stuck on the couch has been the opportunity for uninterupted reading time. I have enjoyed 3 Karen Kingsbury novels for pleasure reading (I have decided to go back to the beginning and actually read the books they way they were written) and Yesterday I just picked up a Leaving the Saints by Martha Beck which was recommended to me by my dear friend, Esther. I also have various tech books/magazines I get from ASCD (a teacher magazine that has some great inovative teaching ideas etc.) and Educational Horizons from Pi Lambda Theta (Educations Honor Society). I rather enjoy reading a few different books at a time which is not always easy, but something I picked up long ago.

I love to read and have since discovered that they best way to teach how proficient readers read, is to study my own reading habits and learn along with the children. There are so many wonderful techniques that work well with Guided Reading, I love trying them out. Something I read really stuck out to me however, that is, how can we expect our students to gain deeper understanding of what they are reading by using the techniques etc. that we teach them, unless we first look at our own reading and use the same techniques and principles. Ahh lightbulb moment.

I am a huge proponent for adult book studies and had I taken the library job at one of my favorite schools, I had already been plotting to introduce a book "club" of sorts for the teachers using "fun" reading to practice Guided Reading and to help them get in touch with their own reading understanding. I would imagine this will still be something I will probably do whereever I finally end up teaching on a full time basis.

Oh, I should probably tell those of you who are not teachers, Guiding Reading is just a trade name for a process of demonstrating the skill you want the students to learn with text that is a little harder than what they could do on their own, then giving them a chance to practice the skill with the teachers help using text that is closer to what they can read on their own, then finally releasing the students to use the skill in their own level of reading, then finally bringing the students back to discuss the use of the skill, do any "tweaking" that might need to be done, etc, and celebrate the successful use of the new skill by the students as they take what they learned and apply it to new text. It is really amazing to see this in action. The students gain such a deeper understanding of what they are reading. I am still amazed by the level of conversation my 10 year old and I now have over whatever book he is currently reading. He has such deeper understanding of the characters and what is happening in the story lines that it is fun to watch him get so excited about reading. I see this so often in many of the students who have taken part in this approach to literacy. Truly inspiring...

Any thoughts, ideas that have worked for you, examples of how you approach literacy? Please share.