#DAN BROWN MUSEUM CARROT WEATHER HOW TO#
As reading theorist Frank Smith put it, “Children know how to comprehend, provided they are in a situation that has the possibility of making sense to them” (1997). When students are reading stories that are interesting to them, and when the books are written at their independent reading level, comprehension-the making of meaning-is direct, and kids understand. Reading comprehension is not a set of sub-skills or strategies that children need to be taught to bring to bear once they’ve learned to translate letters to sounds. When reading is meaning-filled, understanding cannot be separated from decoding. We understand that the only delivery system for reading comprehension is reading. We offer help when readers need it, and we teach children, one at a time, about books and reading in the daily, quiet conversations in our reading workshops. Teachers read a lot of the books that we hope our students will, so we can make knowledgeable recommendations. Instead of investing in class sets of novels or expensive basals or anthologies, we make classroom libraries of individual titles our budget priority. We’ve also learned that students need access to a wide, up-to-date assortment of inviting titles. Our students have demonstrated that opportunities to consider, select, and reconsider books make reading feel sensible and attractive to children right from the start-that they’ll read more books than we dreamed possible and more challenging books than we dreamed of assigning them.
#DAN BROWN MUSEUM CARROT WEATHER FREE#
Starting in kindergarten, free choice of books is a child’s right, not a privilege granted by a kind teacher. Personal preference is the foundation, walls, and ceiling in building a reader for a lifetime. We get that it’s essential for every child to be able to say These are my favorite books, authors, genres, and characters this year, and this is why.
CTL teachers buy the best children’s literature we can find, conduct booktalks and bookwalks, and help our students choose books, develop and refine literary criteria, and carve out identities for themselves as readers. And we have learned that the only sure-fire way to induce a love of books is to invite students to select their own. We understand that when particular children love their particular books, reading is more likely to happen during the time set aside for it.
We know that students need time to read, at school and home, every day. Our goal is for every child to become a skilled, passionate, habitual, critical reader-as novelist Robertson Davies put it, to learn how to make of reading “a personal art.” Along the way, CTL teachers hope our students will become smarter, happier, more just, and more compassionate people because of the worlds they experience within those hundreds of thousands of lines of print. It just happens to be the only way anyone ever became a reader. A child sitting in a quiet room with a good book isn’t a flashy or marketable teaching method. That is frequent, voluminous, self-selected reading. My K-6 colleagues and I make time every day for our students to curl up with good books and engage in the single activity that consistently correlates with high levels of performance on standardized tests of reading ability. In the lower grades, the numbers are similarly high. The annual average number of books read by seventh and eighth grade readers at CTL is at least forty titles.
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