The schools we have. The schools we need.

This week I read Allington's article which takes a look at some "confusions" about successful literacy teaching and the changes that need to be made to our schools in order to better meet the needs of all our students. One of the things that I found most interesting in this article was a proposed idea that instead of having short blocks of reading instruction every day, we should instead consider spending Monday and Tuesday only doing reading. With that schedule, children would be able to really dive into books with extended periods of time for independent reading. The hour or so that schools have allotted for reading everyday is a short time to cover everything that children need in order to develop good literacy skills. In that time it is even more difficult to find time for children to read books of their choosing. I know it would be nearly impossible for any school to switch to a schedule that allowed 2 days of solid literacy instruction and practice, but it could be very benificial to those who struggle with reading. What do you think of this idea? how could having two days soley for reading help and hurt your students?

What books should your students read?

As teachers we need to provide appropriate reading materials for our students who are at various levels of reading. This should be easy, right? As a teacher you may have several leveled readers collections in your classroom, but they may not be leveled the same way. I found Rog and Burton's article to be very interesting because a group of teachers took on the task of "re-leveling" their collections to be uniform.The inconsistencies between leveled reader collections make it very difficult to incorporate new materials into classrooms. It would be great if all books for children used the same system so that teachers and parents could provide children with appropriate reading materials. I think the system described in the article gave good descriptions of what they believe to be the various levels of books and the characteristics of the readers who should read each book. I feel like a group of teachers could use this system to re-level their own books in order to take the guess work out of what is an appropriate book for each child.