jaimie k's reflection to taberski ch. 2...

It’s always interesting to learn how others view things. Sharon Taberski has some really neat and easily understandable ways of explaining her thoughts on reading. I thought the section about Motivating Children to Love to Read was great. I love the metaphor she used in the second paragraph about reading and baseball. She said, “Imagine making your child work at the batting station until he got really good, and only then letting him enjoy the excitement of playing in the game!” (page 12). It’s so true! Why did we ever think that we can’t let children read what they want to read? If they want to read a book that’s too hard or too easy then we should let them. We should just be happy with the fact that they want to read in the first place, not what they read.

But if that’s what we want, to let students read what ever books they want to, then why do we label the books and the students by reading levels? When we identify students with reading labels, they are in a sense “restricted.” They have to “pass” the level they’re on before they can move on to the next. By doing this, aren’t we limiting the students to what they’re allowed to read? In a sense aren’t we telling them where they should and should not be? A lot of teachers give goals for their students, saying that by the end of the quarter they should be up to level __. So they have to keep reading the books in those levels until they reach the “goal.” That’s not allowing them to read what ever they want. Why can’t we not label anything, the books and the students, and just let them read? Throughout the year, we can just help them improve their reading. When doing running records with them, we can still “suggest” books for them, but the students won’t know if they or any of their classmates are behind or ahead of them in reading. Then no one will feel ashamed.