The Book Whisperer: Awakening the Inner Reader in Every Child

Reading changes your life. Reading unlocks worlds unknown or forgotten, taking travelers around the world and through time. Reading helps you escape the confines of school and pursue your own education. Through characters – the saints and the sinners, real or imagined – reading shows you how to be a better human being.

Books are love letters (or apologies) passed between us, adding a layer of conversation beyond our spoken words.

I am a reader, a flashlight-under-the-covers, carries-a-book-everywhere-I-go​, don't-look-at-my-Amazon-bill. I choose purses based on whether I can cram a paperback into them, and my books are the first items I pack into a suitcase. I am the person who family and friends call when they need a book recommendation or cannot remember who wrote Heidi. My identity as a person is so entwined with my love of reading and books that I cannot separate the two.

The purpose of school should not be to prepare students for more school. We should be seeking to have fully engaged students now.

If you don't read, I don't know how to communicate with you...I can never express who I am in my own words as powerfully as my books can.

Students will read if we give them the books, the time, and the enthusiastic encouragement to do so. If we make them wait for the one unit a year in which they are allowed to choose their own books and become readers, they may never read at all. To keep our students reading, we have to let them.

I realized that every lesson, conference, response, and assignment I taught must lead students away from me and toward their autonomy as literate people.

If you ever think you have all the answers, it’s time to retire.

Students will rise to the level of a teacher’s expectations.

Providing students with the opportunity to choose their own books to read empowers and encourages them. It strengthens their self-confidence, rewards their interests, and promotes a positive attitude toward reading by valuing the reader and giving him or her a level of control. Readers without power to make their own choices are unmotivated.

I am a reader, a flashlight-under-the-covers, carries-a-book-everywhere-I-go, don't-look-at-my-Amazon-bill reader. I choose purswes based on whether I can cram a paperback into them, and my books are the first items I pack ingo a suitcase.

I know from personal experience that readers lead richer lives, more lives, than those who don’t read.

I need to put forward more encouraging terms for my students than the negative popular terminology struggling and reluctant. Where is the hope in these terms? I prefer to use positive language to identify the readers in my classes. Peeking into my classroom, I see sixty different readers with individual reading preferences and abilities, but I consistently recognize three trends: developing readers, dormant readers, and underground readers.

Why aren’t adults, even teachers, reading, and what is this doing to our students?

Without spending increasingly longer periods of time reading, they won’t build endurance as readers, either. Students need time to read and time to be readers.

I want my students to learn what life readers know: reading is its own reward. Reading is a university course in life; it makes us smarter by increasing our vocabulary and background knowledge of countless topics. Reading allows us to travel to destinations that we will never experience outside of the pages of a book. Reading is a way to find friends who have the same problems we do and who can give advice on solving those problems. Through reading, we can witness all that is noble, beautiful, or horrifying about other human beings. From a book’s characters, we can learn how to conduct ourselves. And most of all, reading is a communal act that connects you to other readers, comrades who have traveled to the same remarkable places that you have and been changed by them, too. Rewarding reading with prizes cheapens it, and undermines students’ chance to appreciate the experience of reading for the possibilities that it brings to their life. For students who read a lot, these programs are neither an incentive, nor a challenge. Yes, my classes participate in the schoolwide incentive programs when they are offered; after all, they would blaze past the requirements anyway. But I never let my students lose sight of what the true prize is; an appreciation of reading will add more to their life than a hundred days at Six Flags ever could.

Reading changes your life, Reading unlocks worlds unknown or forgotten, taking travelers around the world and through time. Reading helps you escape the confines of school and pursue your own education. Through characters- the saints and sinners, real or imagined- reading shows you how to be a better human being.

The uninitiated might say that I am lost in my books, but I know I am more found than lost.

Instead of standing on a stage each day, dispensing knowledge to my young charges, I should guide them as they approach their own understandings.

This is how I show my students that I love them—by putting books in their hands, by noticing what they are about, and finding books that tell them, “I know. I know. I know how it is. I know who you are, and even though we may never speak of it, read this book, and know that I understand you.” We speak in this language of books passing back and forth, books that say, “You are a dreamer; read this.” “You are hurting inside; read this.” “You need a good laugh; read this.

When my principal interviews candidates for a teaching position at my school, regardless of whether it’s a language arts position, he always asks them to discuss the last book they read.

Are the activities and assessments we use accomplishing our intended instructional goals, or are they simply what we have always done?

no matter the intervention, developing readers must spend substantial instructional time actually reading if they are to attain reading competence.

Readers are made, not born. Few students spring out of the ground fully formed as readers. They need help, and we cannot assume that they will get it from home, but they should always get it from us, their teachers.

By middle school, students have an image of themselves as readers or nonreaders. Students who do not read see reading as a talent that they do not have rather than as an attainable skill.

Providing students with the opportunity to choose their own books to read empowers and encourages them. It strengthens their self-confidence, rewards their interests, and promotes a positive attitude toward reading by valuing the reader and giving him or her a level of control. Readers without power

I think that dormant readers might become engaged readers if someone showed them that reading was engaging.

We have created a culture of reading poverty in which a vicious cycle of aliteracy has the potential to devolve into illiteracy for many students. By allowing students to pass through our classrooms without learning to love reading, we are creating adults (who then become parents and teachers) who don't read much. They may be capable of reading well enough to perform academic and informational reading, but they do not love to read and have few life reading habits to model for children.

Books are love letters (or apologies) passed between us, adding a layer of conversation beyond our spoken words. Neither one of us could imagine spending our life with someone who did not read.

Ten books or twenty books are not enough to instill a love of reading in students. They must choose and read many books for themselves in order to catch the reading bug. By setting the requirement as high as I do, I ensure that students must have a book going constantly. Without the need to read a book every single day to stay on top of my requirement, students would read as little as they could. They might not internalize independent reading habits if my requirement expected less from them.