Reading
Independent Reading Expectations and Rules
8 Expectations for Independent Reading
1. Read as much as you can, as joyfully as you can.
2. Read at home. Make a plan for how much time you will read at home. Try for anywhere between fifteen minutes to a half an hour a day.
3. Find books, authors, subjects, themes, and genres that matter to you, your life, who you are now, and who you might become.
4. Try new books, authors, subjects, purposes, and genres. Expand your knowledge, your experience, and you appreciation of literature.
5. Develop and articulate your own criteria for selecting and abandoning books.
6. Establish and work toward significant goals for yourself as a reader.
7. Recognize that there are different approaches to reading and different stances readers take in relation to different texts- for example, contemporary realistic fiction is different from a poem, which is different from a chapter in your history book, which is different from a newspaper editorial.
8. During independent reading time take a deliberate stance toward engaging and responding with your whole heart and mind. Enter the reading and stretch your imagination, live other lives and learn about your own, find prose and poetry so well written it knocks you out, experiences and understand problems and feelings you might never know, find stories that make you happy and feed your soul, consider how writers have written and why, acquire their knowledge, ask questions, escape, think, travel, ponder, laugh, cry, love, and grow up.
Library Checkout
Be prepared to go to the library every Monday during reading class. Remember to come to class with all of your books to either renew or return. You are expected to have at least one chapter book checked out at a time. Also, make sure to carry one library book with you at all time. When you are finished with a task and waiting for further instructions from any teacher, reading is a perfect choice to keep you quiet and not distract others around you.