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| Eliott Reyna on Unsplash |
This would usually involve me modeling behaviour while the rest of the class settled into comfortable spaces to read.
This lack of reading opportunities would be tragic if it were to continue. There is so much value in sustained silent reading - even for older students.
How do we get it back?
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| Photo by Rubén García on Unsplash |
It's our duty to read; a responsibility, really. Without reading = poverty of thought.
In our staffroom at school, we talk a lot about reading. What we're reading, where we read, how to teach our students reading, when we are reading, our favourite books, book club books and events...
But we don't often touch on why we read.
Thomas Oppong wrote an interesting piece that I have bookmarked to read in my leisure. His claim is that reading rewires parts of our brain.Human beings invented reading only a few thousand years ago. And with this invention, we rearranged the very organization of our brain, which in turn expanded the ways we were able to think, which altered the intellectual evolution of our species. . . . Our ancestors’ invention could come about only because of the human brain’s extraordinary ability to make new connections among its existing structures, a process made possible by the brain’s ability to be reshaped by experience.This is all important for educators as reading involves several brain functions, including visual and auditory processes, phonemic awareness, fluency, comprehension, and more.
At twilight birds with razor-sharp beaks came to relentlessly scoop out his flesh. But as darkness covered the land, the birds would fly off somewhere, and that land would silently fill in his flesh with something else, some other indeterminate material.A master class of flair!
