Reading is Such a Beautiful Thing

I love reading. Anyone who knows me knows that I love reading, and one of my big goals as a teacher is to instill that in children. I want to show children the endless possibilities and worlds that reading can take you to. I want children to want to read in their spare time and be confident as a reader. It is so amazing to be in New Zealand where reading is a priority and guided reading practices are done right, and I hope to learn a lot from this. On Friday I worked with a group of students with guided reading. It just so happened that the group that I decided to work with had *Dan in the group. I had each student read a paragraph outloud to me while the other students followed along. We worked on projecting our reading voices and adding expression when we are reading. I was so impressed with *Dan becuase he is an amazing oral reader. I immediately gave him positive reinforcement and his face just lit up. Then, another little boy *Mike read outloud and he was also fantastic. I told the group how proud I was of them and their awesome oral reading. However, I had strict rules that while one student was reading aloud the other students were to be following along pointing to the words. *Dan was not doing this and when it was his turn he never knew where we were in the book. I had to pull him aside and talk with him about the importance of following along and how it will make him a better reader. He started to follow along much better then. The students really enjoyed the book that they read and then I had them do a fun activity to go along with their reading and they loved that.