Closing Thoughts To grow as readers, students need to read a lot—both at school and at home (children spend the majority of their time outside of school, and those hours should be filled with reading). For those who engage in voluminous reading, the benefits are immeasurable. Avid readers: • Expand their vocabularies —Learn thousands of new words incidentally through reading. Students with robust vocabularies are successful readers and learners. • Deepen and broaden their background knowledge and expand their capacity to comprehend —Read more, learn more, know more—and thus, comprehend more with every book they read. Voluminous reading puts children on an upward spiral for continuous growth. • Become fluent readers —Learn the music of language—phrasing, prosody, rhythm, and rate. • Develop awareness of text structure and format —Become familiar with different kinds of genres, both literary and informational, as well as the structure, format, and elements of texts; learn that genre serves the purpose of the text. • Master the foundational conventions of language —Develop critical understandings about how written language is organized and assembled: letters, sounds, and how they work together to create the sound system of written language. • Absorb critical information about how to write —Learn to write and control all the foundational skills such as spelling, grammar, and punctuation—every time students open the pages of a book they receive a lesson in how to structure a sentence, a paragraph, or a whole texts, how to begin a piece and end it. It’s no surprise that our best writers are also our strongest readers. • Know themselves as readers —Build rich reading lives. Students who are readers can talk about their favorite authors, topics, themes, and genres. They understand the joy of reading, deeply and profoundly. • Become confident readers with a growth mindset —Develop a can-do spirit and growth mindset about their reading abilities. It’s easy to feel confident and believe in yourself as a capable learner when you’re supported by the wide-ranging knowledge that reading makes possible. • Achieve the goals of higher ELA standards —Meet the goals of rigorous English language arts standards and beyond; avid readers do all that and more with every book they read.
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CHAPTER 2: READING
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