Making Reading Interesting - Book Club and Reader's Theatre

I wanted to touch on two things that I got out of Brown's article, "What Kind of Text...". The article did a nice job of talking through the levels of reading learning and the scaffolding that different types of text that can provide with the different levels of reading. And the conclusion was good - that a large variety of text styles are appropriate in a classroom to support the variety of learners in that classroom. But, the two things I want to focus on were more supporting evidence in the examples used in the article. The first was the Reader's Theatre and the second was the Book Club. Both of these ideas were used to support the student's reading, but also to increase their interest.

Reader's Theatre was used with the child who was in the 'Breaking the Code' phase. The idea of the Reader's Theatre is to have the student's perform the story. To do this requires multiple readings of the text. For a child at this level, multiple readings provides more time to allow the text to become sight words - leading to more meaningful reading. And the performances were put on in groups, so the children have fun working on them - coming up with voices, etc (again, a way to put meaning in the text). As Brown said, Reader's Theatre provides "ownership and motivation".

The other idea was the Book Clubs. The book clubs are mentioned in the 'Going for Fluency' group, specifically with a child who is a fairly fluent reader, but who does not read for fun. By doing the book club, the child is able to select a subject matter that appeals to him and then join in a discussion with other student's who share that interest. The discussion, or other projects (journaling, art, etc) can lead to a deeper understanding of the reading. It also encourages a deeper reading level since the children are thinking about a question for discussion.

Both of these ideas were great ideas to set the children up for a lifetime of reading for pure pleasure in a way that does not seem to happen if they are just told to read their half hour of reading each night for homework.