Academic Homeschooling: creating lifelong readers

(I'm currently working on a series of five things to try in your homeschool this coming year. If you missed part 1, check it out!)

Now that you've chosen your online learning opportunity, it's time to look at what else you can maximize, change and create. The next idea is a challenging one for many parents and nearly every teacher I've ever met. Most of us grew up in a system of assigned reading, in books that the whole class read, including 45 minutes of read-aloud every single day for weeks on end to make sure "everyone was paying attention." I'm positive some great works of literature were utterly destroyed for me in this system. If you even mention The Great Gatsby, I shudder a little. So while this next idea will make many homeschoolers say "But but!" and dramatically raise skepticism, please give it a try. If you can't throw caution to the wind for the whole year, try a month or even two!

Let the kids read what they want to read

Seriously...

I said this before but I'm saying it again...

Do not assign another book. Or even genre. Or tell them to put away the magazines or comics.

Lifelong passionate readers are created by reading what they're passionate about. Not by assigning books.

There it is- the skeptical look and the "But But!!"

Research shows it again and again- let kids read what they want to read and they are far more likely to enjoy reading, pursue reading as a pleasurable hobby and to read outside of the classroom. Once you've made reading enjoyable, you can gently guide kids into other choices of topics or challenge levels.

If you cannot resist and absolutely must put some sort of assignment or requirement on it, I highly recommend The Reader's Odyssey: An Individualized Literature Program for Homeschooling Middle and High School Students as a way to help you choose great books, guide reading, writing and exploration.

Keep track of your child's pacing and reading. I keep a Google doc with the titles and dates he has completed the book. I also use this same doc to make recommendations to other families, to make sure I don't request the book from the library again and to compare how he's moving through genres and styles.

If you lose your motivation for this, think back to sitting in your dreaded high school or junior high literature class, listening to Billy read a paragraph as slow as possible in a book you hated. Remind yourself of the times you abandoned a book your friends all loved. That's your freedom as a reader! Give that freedom to your kids too!

I am a huge fan of Donalyn Miller and The Book Whisperer. I recommend it to all homeschooling families, classroom teachers and anyone who has ever wondered how to raise a reader. If they listen and they like it, I beg them to follow up with Reading in the Wild to add in some extra tools for homeschoolers and teachers.

The more teachers try to strong arm kids into reading the prescribed reading list, the more they avoid it. In an age where you can google a summary in under one minute, it's becoming increasingly more difficult for teachers to even know if their students read the assigned reading. It's time to ask what was the point of the assigned reading in the first place and find a different way. Is the goal to read that specific book? That genre? Learn more about that time, place or character? All of these can be accomplished by student-centered, student-led choice. Donalyn Miller is a genius at gently guiding kids into choosing books that are at just the right time, place and level. It takes a significant amount of work to maintain a classroom library of her size, but it is worth it every step of the way. Students who learn to love books become lifelong readers.

If we know nothing else about reading, we know that force-feeding classics into a kid's brain does not make him appreciate it. It doesn't encourage them to try another by the same author or to branch out into a different genre set in the same time period. It feels like torture. If you don't believe me, then promise to sit down and read thirty minutes of Anna Karenina before you even touch Facebook tomorrow morning. You might love it, but chances (and reading research) says you'll resent the time stolen from your morning and you'll hate every minute of it.

So let the kids read! If you really want them to love it, read it to them no matter how old they are. Give them time to read on their own, with a book of their choice and you'll encourage better reading habits and develop students who read for pleasure, not just torturous "popcorn" reading in class.

If you really want kids to read particular books, read them aloud or choose them on audio book format instead. I find this works particularly well if you pause the audio book at a cliffhanging section and just leave the book laying around the house. If it's engaging and interesting, your child feel compelled to go figure out what's happened!

How does free reading work for us in our house? It's simple. He reads whatever he wants. There's always a book in the car, one on the couch and one next to his bed (though sometimes it's the same book he's carrying around from place to place.) I keep a reading log of what he's finished, with the date of completion. He loves to read and is a passionate reader, but he's not particularly interested in choosing his own books. I take advantage of Scholastic Book Wizard and the Amazon Best Sellers and New Releases lists about once a week to request a pile of books (or ebooks) from our library. I don't censor his reading choices- if he's interested he'll pick it up and if he's not, he'll give it back. He read Hunger Games as a 4th grader because he was extremely interested. He handed me back a book a few weeks ago that started with a kissing scene he didn't appreciate. He's learning to be discerning about what he reads and doesn't and I'm 100% okay with that.

Friends know he's a voracious reader and often ask me for recommendations. Here's the thirty nine books he's read since July 2014 (almost forty books in six months!) By my best estimate, he has read well over 11,000 pages. Sure, some are below his reading level but he loved them! Some, like the Warriors series, were popular among friends at the time and an easy read to keep up with the conversation. Others challenged his thinking, made him laugh, question, wonder and feel for characters. As long as he keeps going back to books, it's all good with me.

1)Warriors 7/26

2) The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy 8/3

3) Warriors- Midnight 8/7

4) Warriors- Moonrise 8/8

5) Warriors- Dawn 8/9

6) The Black Stars 8/11

7) Fire Dragon Academy 8/12

8)Al Capone Does My Shirts8/18

9) The Dark Lord- School's Out 8/21

10) Warriors- Twilight 8/28

11) Warriors- Sunset 8/29

12) Code: A Virals Novel 8/31