The Reading Zone: How to Help Kids Become Skilled, Passionate, Habitual, Critical Readers Review

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The Reading Zone: How to Help Kids Become Skilled, Passionate, Habitual, Critical Readers ReviewNancie Atwell calls her new book The Reading Zone a manifesto: that free choice of books and time to read should be a child's right from kindergarten until high school. She uses her more than 20 years of successful teaching to support her claim that the only delivery system for reading comprehension is reading. I couldn't agree more. Eight years ago I read her seminal work, In the Middle, and it changed my life as a teacher. The techniques she used in her middle school reading and writing workshop affirmed everything I felt in my heart to be true. I worked hard to create my own workshop, wrote grants for books and purchased hundreds myself. I read, read, read until I knew most books well enough to recommend them to my students. And it worked. With independent reading as the mainstay of our reading block, I saw my kids, 7th and 8th graders with little or no previous interest in reading, enter into their own "reading zones" and blossom into authentic readers, right before my eyes, long before the end of the school year.
I should have been ecstatic, but I found myself uneasy. Was it enough to let kids just read and do occasional projects that promoted their books to their peers? It all seemed too simple. I worried that I wasn't doing enough. Eventually, I did what Atwell herself admits to doing in The Reading Zone: I jumped (she says she "vaulted") into teaching comprehension strategies techniques-- predicting, connecting, visualizing, questioning, summarizing, re-telling and so on. This focus should have enriched my workshop, but it didn't. Atwell explains far better than I what happened in her classroom that caused her to "collect the sticky notes," and makes the case that these are study skill techniques, valuable in approaching difficult text, material above a student's independent reading, but unsuitable for teachers to focus on during workshop. Insisting that students stop and predict, list connections, etc., interrupts the reader, slowing him down and taking him out of the "zone."
One of the book's most compelling chapters is a long overdue a cry to our colleagues at the high school level. Atwell writes about seeing her avid readers graduate eighth grade--and become non-readers for the next four years. She could have been writing about my students, or my own daughter whose experiences with the sacred canon of literature, The Scarlet Letter, Great Expectations, vocabulary pages, grammar exercises and the like, mirrored that of her former student who "lost" four years as a reader. Fortunately, both young women made the journey back to a love of literature in college, but are probably among a select few. Atwell asks high school teachers to re-consider how they teach English, to think about what will make a true difference in the intellectual lives of their students.
Those who want practical advice on acquiring, displaying, and maintaining classroom libraries, as well as ways to meet the needs of all readers, including those with learning disabilities, techniques to assess that don't include busywork, etc., will find it in The Reading Zone. But make no mistake: this book is passionate, compelling, beautifully written and lean--at 140 pages, it's a far cry from In the Middle--but is every bit as important for teachers "who can help children seek, and find, delight and enlargement of life in books."The Reading Zone: How to Help Kids Become Skilled, Passionate, Habitual, Critical Readers Overview

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