Middle School Readers

I have to admit, I bought Middle School Readers: Helping Them Read Widely, Helping Them Read Well by Nancy Allison without even reading that much about it. Seeing the title, knowing it was specifically about reading in middle school, as well as the fun picture was enough for me to click right over to Amazon and place my order. Though I knew the book would be focused on student choice in reading, I had no idea that it would be such a perfect fit for my personal professional development right now. With the first chapter I was ready to burst with excitement when I realized that the whole book was centered around the concept of supported independent reading. While Allison does not call it reading workshop, the concepts aligned with the components of workshop. She discussed scaffolding to help students make good decisions about the books they read, linking mini-lessons to conferences, reflections she has students do in their notebooks to practice strategies discussed in the mini-lessons.

I can not think of a better time that I could have picked up this book. I am a couple of school weeks away from completing the second quarter. It is a great time for me to reflect about what has been going well and what I want to improve. Over the break I am spending some time in my classroom to plan for the second half of the year for each content area. I had wanted to strengthen my reading mini-lessons. Allison gave me so many ideas on how I can do this, as well as how I can make sure that reflections and conferences are linked to the mini-lesson. What I love the most is that Allison advocates starting out conferences with a connection to the mini-lesson, but then of course it is individualized. If the student is already confident in the mini-lesson topic the teacher can push them further in their reading with whichever area they need. On the other hand if the teacher notices the need to go back and reteach, that is the direction the conference will take. It seems so obvious to have the mini-lesson as a starting point that as soon as I read it, it made perfect sense, but I had not been doing that intentionally with my conferences.

I thought the book complements other books I have been reading lately well, such as The Book Whisperer and Conferring. The three books read together each helped me delve deeper into the topic. While they have some conflicting views, such as Donalyn Miller (The Book Whisperer) being against reading logs and Allison advocating them, for the most part they support each others' ideas. I am actually leaning toward the benefits of logs and/or status of the class because they have given me valuable data about my students' reading habits that I might have missed otherwise. Reading the book also made me think about how I need to go back and revisit some of my favorite books on comprehension, such as I Read It, But I Don't Get It, When Kids Can't Read-What Teachers Can Do, and Mosaic of Thought.

The margins of the book are filled with notes of ideas that I want to implement in order to strengthen my existing reading block. I know that I will be revisiting this book often and that I will be a better teacher because of Allison's ideas that I will be able to easily weave into my classroom. Her ideas will help me weave together the different components of my reading workshop in order to help my students even more. I highly recommend this resource!