Book Love by Penny Kittle

Book Love by Penny Kittle

I love this book! I feel like Penny absolutely captured my views on reading. As a resource teacher over the years, I would visit classrooms and see countless kids listening to the teacher talk about a text rather than reading. The students would lack the focus to read or have any interest in reading since personal choice in reading was just not important in the classroom. Over the last few years, I have been fighting this mentality in my students now that I have my own class. Helping my students to choose appropriate books and to delve deeper into the stories has been very rewarding for me as I have seen at least a shift in their attitude towards reading.

In this book, the information is presented in more of a story format showing how she has implemented this approach in her classroom. What I find so compelling about the story is that there are so many ways to interpret the information. A colleague and myself read the book and found ways to include the 'Book Love' approach into our classroom in different ways. Each time I discuss the book I think of new ways that the information could work in my situation while accomplishing many of the same goals.

The basic approach, -sorry Penny if it is supposed to be more complicated- is to allow students the freedom to choose books they are interested in while supporting them in reflecting on the text and progressing to more challenging reading materials. In the book, she also explains how she uses reading to help students improve their writing, which for me is a next step.

Here are a couple of things I have tried:

1. For any student who sits there without a book complaining about how boring reading is, try saying, "You just haven't found the right book yet." I thought this was a silly statement, till I tried it on one of my reluctant girl readers. It took most of grade 8 to find a book for her, but using that statement kept her trying to find a book all year. Eventually, we found one, the Book of Awesome, and she refused to put it down. The best part was when another student was refusing to read one day and bothering other students she intervened and said, "If you can not find a book it is because you haven't found the right one yet. Keep looking!" Made my day.
2. One way to show off the reading that was happening, was a book wall that I created at the back of the room. Anytime a student finished reading a book I would photocopy the cover and write their name beside it. If another student happened to read the same book, their name went under the other name. By the end of the year, every student got their book and subsequently their name on the wall. This really helped develop a culture of reading and the importance it had in our room. One of my students actually had their name on the wall over 40 times in one school year, it was amazing to see him add the books to the wall.
   
3. This was the first year I tried it, but every student in my class had to create a book talk for a book they read during the school year. This summer I am taking those book talks and uploading them to YouTube so my incoming students have a place to start when looking for a book. This is to help students find books that are of interest to them. I just can not read them all.

            

Developing stamina in reading is so important for success in high school and beyond and this resource will help you get your students there.

Let me know your thoughts or ideas. I would love to hear them.

James