Motivation to Read

I am pleased with my schedule this year, mostly because it groups similar grades together for their library classes, so I feel that I am less scattered and more able to teach consistently across grade levels.  I also have larger blocks of time to really dig into my planning and put together lessons and units without a lot of interruptions.

One theme I have been working on is related to the importance of reading in life.  I administered a survey near the beginning of the year to the 4th and 5th grade students, measuring their perception of themselves as readers and how much they value reading itself.  I started with questions from the Motivation to Read Profile and then added some of my own to create my own survey and find out more about students' interests and ideas about reading.

After the survey I was concerned to find a large percentage of 4th graders did not have a high opinion of reading.  I feel that this is something I can teach, as I understand that students may not like to read and may not choose to do it independently when they have free time, but I think they need to understand the importance of reading in our lives.  So I have been working on some subtle lessons to cover this idea.  

I do not want to push students even farther away from reading by hitting them over the head with this idea during their library time, so I have been reading some stories with this topic, such as Miss Brooks Loves Books (and I Don't!) by Barbara Bottner.  This worked successfully this week with a 4th grade class with a large number of students who scored low results on the survey.  In the book, a student does not like to read and does not understand her librarian, who loves books.  The librarian dresses up in costumes and obviously loves to read and loves to encourage children to read.  The student despairs of ever finding a book that she will love, especially because she is given an assignment to share a book with the class and explain why she likes it, which seems to be an impossible task.  Finally, after many tries, the librarian hands her Shrek by William Steig, and the ugly, warty ogre captures her heart.

After I read Miss Brooks, this class begged me to read Shrek aloud, so I pulled it off the shelf and read it immediately.  They were surprised that it is different than the movie, but mostly they seemed to take to heart that everyone might just have a favorite book out there somewhere among the 10,000 we have in our library.  We just have to find it.  It might be ugly, rude and disgusting, but it will be someone's favorite.

We will continue to talk about favorite books and why reading is so important in our lives as the weeks go on.  I hope to measure a positive change in students' attitudes toward reading and their own self-concept of their reading when I administer the survey again in the spring.