The Book Whisperer

Here is the review I wrote for Amazon about this great book, The Book Whisperer by Donalyn Miller. I received it as part of the Amazon vine program. This program sends out free books to willing reviewers (of which I am one). They send you a list via email of the books that are available for review, and you can choose two. Last month The Book Whisperer was one of my choices.

"This book by a Texas sixth grade teacher confirms what I've long believed, as a teacher myself: that books are way under-rated. I tutor students from first grade to college, and I consistently find that students don't read enough real books for pleasure, usually. The ones who do become the good students, and they usually read outside of class, on their own time. Many students' lives are so crowded with busy work--a.k.a. homework--that they don't have time to sink into a great book and read for long periods of time.

"It's amazing how teachers whose job it is to teach reading don't actually use real books to teach reading: they use interminable worksheets, exercises, vocabulary drills, reading primers, anything but a real book. Recently I was tutoring a first grader who is slightly behind in his reading skills. His mother is very worried. All I did was show him a book that emerging readers love: Bears on Wheels. Pretty soon he could read that book. Then he read Hop on Pop. He was so excited! I had told him that the books were library books. After our tutoring session, he ran up to me in the parking lot and said, 'Shannon! How much do those library books cost?' Imagine my pleasure in telling him that they were completely free.

"I was surprised, though, that he had not been to a public library yet. It seems that many parents don't avail themselves of this wonderful free resource. But teaching a child to read is not rocket science: all it takes is a pile of picture books, a lap, and some time. Yes, phonics is important; but it's a means to an end, not an end in itself. The end is reading pleasure.

"Ms. Miller requires her sixth graders to read forty books during the school year. And they do! One secret to her success is simply having a lot of books in her classroom: two thousand to be precise. These are her own books, and she can loan them as she likes to students. She has an index card system for tracking who has the books, but she doesn't worry about it too much. Also, she doesn't make them do book reports, vocabulary quizzes about the books, etc. They keep a notebook on their responses to the books they are reading, and they voluntarily do "book commercials" where they tell the class about a book that they loved.

"She does not have the class read a book together, with everybody reading the same novel, as most English teachers do. But she does read aloud to her students, so there are certain books that they all are following and can discuss together.

"In this way, she establishes in her students a habit of reading, which she hopes will last a lifetime. The results are impressive: students who have repeatedly done poorly on standardized tests start to do well on these tests for the first time. It turns out that endless test-taking drills are not nearly as effective in raising test scores as simply letting students read for pleasure.


"I wish more teachers would throw away their worksheets and book report assignments, and just let students read, and read, and read."

Reading and vocabulary; skimming

Sometimes students have a hard time reading a text because it contains so many unfamiliar words. Frequently teachers tell students to look up the words they don't know. But if there are a lot, it slows the reader down so much that the process of looking up all the words can discourage a student from reading at all.

Other teachers encourage students to keep reading when they run into a difficult word. Sometimes the meaning will emerge from the context. But if the student is an ESL student, for whom English is not the first language, this may not work. What is a good compromise between looking up every three or four words and reading very slowly on the one hand, and reading without any comprehension on the other?

Maybe a compromise would be to encourage the reader to read the text as well as she can without using a dictionary, underlining the words that she doesn't know. Then once she has a general sense of what the text is about, she could go back and start looking up some of the words. It may be clearer which words are the most important to understand, and which are not so important.

The truth is that fluent readers skip words and even whole passages when they read. I have found that the people who read the most give themselves permission to skim and skip. Other people have never gotten over their childhood training that one must read every single word of every text that one reads, and they feel guilty if they don't. But you are in charge of your own reading: read what you want to out of any given text! Even assigned texts can often be skimmed profitably. I think it's better, if you have limited time, to skim an entire text rather than just read a quarter of it or less.

Sometimes students come in the writing center having written an essay about a text that they never finished reading! I try to teach them to skim: to read the first paragraph in its entirety, the first sentence of every following paragraph, and the last paragraph in its entirety. Some students have never heard that this is "ok."

The Two Rs

I teach reading and writing at the primary, secondary, and college level. This blog has been set up to discuss ways of teaching reading and writing better, and also to talk about the reading and writing that teachers do for their own pleasure.