#Lost in the storm lexile level free
We get that it's essential for every child we teach to be able to say, " These are my favorite authors, genres, books, and characters this year, and this is why." Personal preference is the foundation, walls, and ceiling in building a reader for a lifetime.Īt CTL, starting in kindergarten and going straight through until the end of middle school, free choice of books is a child's right, not a privilege granted by a kind teacher. So 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 we set aside for it. We know that students need time to read, at school and at home, every day.
#Lost in the storm lexile level how to
It just happens to be the only way anyone ever grew up to become a reader.Īnd that is the goal: 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 that 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 black print.
That is frequent, voluminous, self-selected reading. A child sitting in a quiet room with a good book isn't a flashy or, more significantly, marketable teaching method. 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 at the Center for Teaching and Learning, the numbers are similarly remarkable. Over twenty years of teaching reading in a workshop, the annual average, for a class of seventh and eighth grade readers, is at least forty books.