One of the many resources that my mentor teacher uses are book tubs, as seen by the picture above*. She uses the book tubs for student "read-to-self" time, when each student takes time to read silently or quietly to themselves. The tubs contains 6-8 books of varying levels corresponding to the students reading level. When the students first get their books, the teacher reads each book with them. After the initial reading, the students are completely on their own for reading time. Read-to-self helps the students practice their reading and builds independence. The down side to this activity is that the books are not rotated or changed frequently enough, so instead of reading the students memorize the books and just recite what they remember. The teacher also does not monitor the students while they read, even though a good portion of each school day is spent doing this activity. I would use this type of reading activity in my classroom with modifications. I would not do read-to-self everyday because it can get boring for the students if it becomes a daily activity. I would also not do this activity for more than 30 minutes each time (versus the hour or more that my MT does it), because it is very hard for the students to stay focused on reading and not talking for that long. This activity also needs to be closely monitored while it is happening, and afterwards to be able to assign students the appropriate books at the right time. I would monitor read-to-self closely while still allowing the students to build their independence with reading.
*The picture was found on Google. I was not able to take a picture of my own classroom but the picture shows exactly the same thing as what is used in my classroom.
It's a shame that read-to-self is not being used in a very effective manner. I wonder if your students would benefit more from it if your MT set something up (like in the video we watched in class) where students look through each bin and pick the books they want to read. Maybe they could have a reading log to track their progress through the books. In order to move onto the next book they can have a discussion with the MT about the book. I definitely think that this should be monitored by the MT, no matter what the age of the students. I do think that reading everyday is important. If you make time for it every day then students learn that reading is important. I do agree however that read-to-self does not need to be a full hour everyday. When I was in school we had 15-20 minutes to read to ourselves every day, which I think was the perfect amount of time.
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