Independent Reading Expectations

The Expectations of Independent Reading

An important part of teaching literacy is providing daily opportunities for students to read, on their own; books they have selected themselves.  Through independent reading students:

• Learn to exercise choice as readers, selecting from a wide variety of texts.
• Develop favorite books, types of books, genres, topics, writing styles, and authors.     
• Develop the habit of spending a significant amount of time reading.
• Build a “reading agenda” that includes books, authors and types of books they want to read in the future.  
• Gain “mileage” as readers by processing a large number of texts on a regular basis.
• Engage in fluent reading daily *including well-paced silent reading in which they are processing syntactic structures).
•  Learn about themselves as readers.
• Become part of a community of readers.

Work with your team to develop accountability for your students.  Remeber that minimal competency is four books a month.  Think about methods of differentiation so that less capable readers are successful.