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February 6, 2013 by Jan Burkins & Kim Yaris 4 Comments

What Should Students Read? Independent Reading (Blog Digest, Part 2)

Yesterday, we launched a three-part digest of our blog posts related to independent reading. Yesterday’s digest presented our accumulated thoughts about reading volume, which run across a series of blogs that address the question How much should students read independently? These posts tended to connect to the idea of practice. Today we revisit our independent reading posts that deal with the question What should students read? The ideas of balance and diet connect many of most of these posts.

A Balanced Reading Diet
This post considers the genre requirements of the Common Core and explores the ways variety in reading can stretch different reading muscles and generate interest.

The Power of Informational Text
This blog speaks more to the reason the CCSS shift toward informational text exists in the first place, explaining how access to information will help children access other information that leads to insights and deep conceptual understandings.

The Nutritional Value of Informational Text
This post builds on the Power of Informational Text by enumerating the “nutritional benefits” of informational reading. The narrative text complement to this post is The Nutritional Value of Literary Text. Finally, we wrestle with one teacher’s dilemma about how to guide a child to read in Starving Readers and offer practical advice for considering a child’s reading diet in
Feeding the Reluctant Reader. In this last post we argue that, sometimes, we won’t be able to look at the balance between literary and informational text in a child’s reading diet, because it may be more urgent to look for text that interests them.

Filed Under: Alignment, balance, Common Core State Standards, complex text, Implementation, Informational Text, Instruction, Interpreting the Standards, Literacy Block, Literary Text, Planning for Instruction, Reading, Staircase of Complexity, Text Complexity, text selection Tagged With: anchor standard ten, balance, Common Core State Standards, complex text, independent reading, independently and proficiently, literary text, staircase of complexity, Text Complexity

Comments

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  2. says

    June 17, 2013 at 1:06 pm

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Trackbacks

  1. says:
    June 28, 2013 at 11:49 am

    […] In this, our second post in this three-part digest on independent reading, we explore the WHAT of independent reading and the Common Core State Standards.  […]

    Reply
  2. Friday Favorites: Independent Reading | Burkins & Yaris says:
    June 14, 2013 at 4:04 pm

    […] Yesterday’s Thursday Thoughts have become today’s Friday Favorites, as the pseudo-summer schedule has thrown our internal clocks off. Time feels a little loose and, despite being busy with tasks, we are beginning to run into the summer luxury of occasionally forgetting what day it is. This week we have written about independent reading, both that of students and our own. For your reading pleasure this Friday, we take you back to the three-part blog series that served as a digest of all our posts related to independent reading. From balance in our reading diets to thoughts on reading volume, we’ve done a quite a bit of writing about independent reading and it is gathered in this blog digest for you.  […]

    Reply

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