May
27
The Book Whisperer: Awakening the Inner Reader in Every Child
Posted by admin Comments (10)
The Book Whisperer: Awakening the Inner Reader in Every Child
|
 List Price: $22.95 Sale Price: Too low to display. Availability: unspecified 
|
Product Description
Donalyn Miller says she has yet to meet a child she couldn't turn into a reader. No matter how far behind Miller's students might be when they reach her 6th grade classroom, they end up reading an average of 40 to 50 books a year. Miller's unconventional approach dispenses with drills and worksheets that make reading a chore. Instead, she helps students navigate the world of literature and gives them time to read books they pick out themselves. Her love of books and teaching is both infectious and inspiring. The book includes a dynamite list of recommended "kid lit" that helps parents and teachers find the books that students really like to read.
Details
No features available.
Categories: Kindle Shop
Rating
Donalyn Miller gets it. She understands perfectly why many of our kids don’t like reading any more, and she has the answer. You’d think Congress would be knocking down her door by now. Let’s hope it happens soon.
In the mean time, anyone who considers himself or herself a teacher needs to read THE BOOK WHISPERER. It’s a book that gets right to the heart of what makes us readers and how to instill that love of words and stories in our kids. Miller goes right after so-called “tried and true” methods like comprehension tests, book reports, whole class required novels, and test preparation workbooks not just with empty criticism but with solid research that supports reading time and student choice. More importantly, she provides a healthy list of more kid-friendly, reading-friendly alternative strategies that teachers can use in their classrooms right away.
Truly, this book is a model for getting kids back to books they love, and it provides a great model for classroom teachers to follow. For those who aren’t sure where to start, there are plenty of anecdotes, sample student interactions, and useful classroom forms to get new teachers started.
I’m both a children’s author and a National Board Certified middle school English teacher, and I found myself nodding my way through these pages to the very end. Miller’s ideas — and they’re ideas that smart teachers all over our country are using in various ways — have the power to make a real difference in education.
Rating
This book is almost a fit for all educators. That being said, if you are looking for full, formal lesson plans and worksheets, this is not your text. What this book is, is a quick, forthright read about what has worked in a classroom. Miller acquaints us with what didn’t work for her and then leads us through her successes. She has evolved into a “coach” as a reading teacher and takes many of the strategies that you may have encountered elsewhere in professonal training sessions and explains how she has put them together and added her own personal approach to make them work for her. For educators who struggle to synthesize the different reading components and approaches, such as: “required texts”, workshop model, reading lists, read-alouds, independent reading, etc. this is a helpful read. What makes the book engaging is the small quote boxes from her students, the fact that the recommended book list is of their making, and Miller’s anecdotal evidence about her students. The tone of the book is as though you are hearing a colleague speak of their experiences or getting sage advice from the veteran teacher at your school. For those who want take-aways, the book does have a few student forms and the afore-mentioned book list. Mainly, the benefit of this book is the way that it inspires you to be more excited about reading and helps you shape your thinking into strategies what will enable you to share that excitement in a concrete and successful way in the classroom. My favorite part was the quote where a student talks about being “caught” by a book and having to finish it. What a phenomenal way to phrase it and what a great gift Miller gave this child and so many others.
Rating
I have read many “how to teach reading” books. I have never before enjoyed one like I enjoyed this one.
This book was impossible to put down, both for the ideas and the writing style. I read it straight through in a few hours. It isn’t an academic, foot-noted listing of teaching styles and methods and comparisons. It is a chat with an experienced teacher about the ways she has found to make readers out of every kid that she has in her classes.
As an avid reader and parent/grandparent, I have always looked for ideas about how to foster a love of reading. This book is a must for educators and parents alike who have a similar wish.
Rating
I had no trouble learning to read and learning to love reading as a child. I read all the time and my Mom was wonderful enough to feed my passion. I loved mysteries so she bought me series like The Three Investigators, Nancy Drew, and John Bellairs’ The House with the Clock in its Walls. I loved reading so much that I went on to graduate with a degree in English Literature. My son has the same passion for reading but his favorites are trivia books. He has an impressive collection of books and he is always reading.
My daughter has not yet found this joy and I have read so many books about how to help your child learn to read and/or learn to love reading. None of them have really helped me the way that this book has. The Book Whisperer is all about giving your child daily reading time and to let them choose the books. She also has plenty of experiences to share, books to suggest, and some techniques to instill the excitement of reading. I couldn’t help but have one of those slap on the forehead moments when I realized that this is how it worked for me. This is how it worked for my son. Somehow, because my daughter was slower to pick up the fundamentals, I have lost sight of simply letting her find joy in books. It started to click for me a few months ago when she started listening to Anne of Green Gables on cd. She was enthralled. She loves audio books but is still afraid of digging into the real thing. I’m hopeful that the approaches suggested by the Book Whisperer will help me help her become a lifelong reader.
This book is written for the classroom teacher (by a classroom teacher) but I found it just as useful from a parent point of view.
Rating
This teacher and her teaching methods in this book is probably one of the most inspirational books I have ever read. It’s amazing that this teacher has found a way to get her students to fall in love with reading … only by encouraging the love of reading by providing time in her classroom to read. It is pretty amazing that this woman stumbled on her secret to success by accident. It took a student to ask her if they would be able to read some of the 2,000 books in her classroom in class. With the encouragement of her boss, the principal of her school, she went ahead and carved out reading time in her classroom.
She challenged her sixth graders to read an average of 40 books a year. So far, they’ve rose to the challenge and the majority of them are now life-long readers. The problem wasn’t that students weren’t being taught how to read, the problem was the students were indifferent to reading. There are some students who struggled with reading assignments and were labeled as underachieving readers, and there were readers who just sailed through the reading tests but didn’t care about whether or not they read for fun, and there’s the serious readers who did read but didn’t care for the class’ assignments. Miller changed all that. Over 85% of her students went on to become life-long readers.
Her solutions were simple. Other than carving out reading time in her class (she estimated that it was 30 minutes out of a 90 minute period class, a day), she also had a list of things that she implemented, like affirming the reader in every student, supporting the reading choices her kids may have, carve out extra reading time, modeling authentic reading behavior (that meant, she read a fun book of her own choosing when her students were reading, instead of using that time to catch up on work), and developing a classroom library with 2,000 books for the kids to enjoy.
As a reader who is passionate about reading, this book is an eye-opener and affirms my faith in teachers who are passionate about what they teach. They’re among the children’s first role models in the world outside of the family and Miller’s passion for reading, books and teaching show through every word in this book. I didn’t realize that there are teaching jobs out there where I can teach kids how to read and how to really enjoy reading … until I read this book. It is definitely inspirational to me to think about becoming a teacher on books to kids … and this book is wonderful for those who aren’t even interested in teaching, but maybe looking for a way to affirm their children as readers.
This book is full of tidbits and stories of Miller’s students as they discovered the love of reading. This book is a wonderful addition to any teacher’s personal library as well as to any serious reader’s library. After all, books open one’s eyes to the rest of the world.
3/13/09
Rating
How do you awaken the inner reader in someone? You teach them to read for pleasure. It sounds like such a simple concept really. Forcing spinach down a kid’s throat doesn’t make a kid love spinach any more than forcing boring books down a kid’s throat. But serving that spinach in a souffle and giving a kid a book that they enjoy just might work.
The author pulled me in from the beginning by being a reflection of what I’d like to see myself be as a literature teacher. Mainly, she’s able to turn non-readers into readers and to turn book loathers into book lovers. Her 6th grade class is challenged to read 40 books each year and most go even beyond that goal. But I work with adult ESL students in an American literature class. Could her methods work for them as well? In one week, I’ve already noticed an excitement from my book loathers when I announce that it’s time for pleasure reading in class. They know that if they don’t like something, they’re not going to be forced to read it for “pleasure”. And that seems to make all the difference to them.
I felt the need to underline passages and write in the margins of this book (a rarity for me) as I read. Miller talks about how important it is that students read to become good readers. This is why she feels so strongly about giving free reading time in class. She also feels that teachers should re-evaluate class activities to determine whether such activities are accomplishing anything or are mere busy work that could be replaced by reading time. She also expresses the importance of reading leading to private dialogue or “whispering” between student and teacher and between student and student. This whispering can be accomplished through letters back and forth between student and teacher and from individual student-teacher conferences. It can also be accomplished through book reviews and class projects like book commercials.
Miller seems to have reached many of the same conclusions I’ve reached within the past couple of years. For example, I recently added a class library from among my own books and let students choose their own novel to read rather than reading a group novel. However, many of the things I’ve felt haven’t been working for my class but have had no solution to are things Miller was able to find a solution for. For example, she gives alternative ideas to students stumbling over reading aloud in class round-robin-style. And she discusses alternatives to reading logs which students aren’t likely to keep up with. I also added many of her beginning-of-the-year interest survey questions to the survey I had been using to give me a deeper insight into my students’ minds.
I’m excited by the possibilities this book has offered me for the teaching of my class. I feel that every reading and literature teacher should take the time to read this book. I think that any open-minded, book-loving reading teacher with enough time can use the strategies in this book to help their students develop a genuine love for reading.
Rating
In the past 7 or 8 years, I’ve reviewed over 350 books on Amazon; however, prior to college I could count the books I had read on one hand. All through school I never learned to enjoy reading or how to choose books I would like. Reading was just something I had to do when it was assigned–unless I could get around it.
Donalyn Miller seeks to change this very situation by helping her students learn to love to read. Based on her results, she is extremely successful in developing life-long readers, something that is unfortunately not the norm in our culture. In The Book Whisperer, Miller shares how she helps her students love to read.
The audience for this book is mainly teachers. I think Parents like me will also find this book worthwhile and enlightening. Teachers will probably see things in the book they already now, and they will see things they didn’t know and can employ in their classrooms. Miller contradicts some standard teaching methods for 5th-8th graders. For example, Miller helps students choose book based on their tastes and interests rather than making all students read a classic novel together over several weeks. She has her own extensive library in her room. Students help one another pick out books. Also she shows how independent reading time in class is important and effective for students.
Her most significant attribute for writing this book is her own love for books and reading. She knows books, especially books for students. She includes a list of about 100 books that her students recommend for other children. For parents and children, this list is helpful to have.
Miller provides practical suggestions of how to implement a practice like hers in your classroom. She shows what works and what doesn’t. She teaches how to track students’ activities and progress.
If you want to learn how to awaken the “inner reader” in children or students, this is a good place to start.
Craig Stephans, author of Shakespeare On Spirituality: Life-Changing Wisdom from Shakespeare’s Plays
Rating
Books are criticized all the time for what they lack. Even prolific and enormously successful J. K. Rowling has been bashed for everything from selling out to commercialization to satanism and devil worship. How gratifying to find in this tight book lots of reasons kids should be reading and lots of ways to get them to do so. Miller’s approach is a bit different. She wildly embraces the concept of kids making their own reading choices and reading independently. No moronic worksheets for comprehension or cribbed book reports here, just lots of suggestions for the classroom library and lots of ways for kids to talk about their choices intelligently to adults and especially to other kids, spreading the word quite literally. Courageously, Miller even admits to developing her classroom library entirely at her own expense and invites others to do so as well. She says it’s really the only way to create a sufficiently extensive library with ever shrinking school budgets and shrunken head administrators who are more interested in competency testing scores than in children learning to read. She also provides some inexpensive and even free methods of acquiring books. This is great stuff, highly recommended, and THE reading inspiration book for this genreration.
Rating
As a reader and a teacher, I loved this book. I was actually put off by the title (could we stop with the “fill-in-the-blank Whisperer” titles, please?), but once I started the book, I had a hard time putting it down. As a teacher, everything Miller said made sense. She is spot on in terms of the studies she cites–yes, the most important thing we can do to make our students better readers & writers is to simply let them read–and she presents her material in an engaging, fluent voice. My classroom, I believe, will be revolutionized by her suggestions. My high school kids already have a time for silent reading, but I will be implementing many of Miller’s techniques come the new school year, which I think will enhance our 15 minutes of SSR. I’m thrilled that I stumbled upon this little book, and I recommend it to all teachers, especially those hard-working elementary school teachers. Put it on your summer reading list! It’s a must read!!
Rating
Book Whisperer is extraordinary. It is not a bunch of boring lesson plans or stringent SOL guidelines. This book is full of the reality of how children read and become readers. Mrs. Miller is brilliant in understanding that you can’t force children to enjoy reading and has learned well how to bring out the reader in children, encouraging them not only to read but to enjoy it.
She shares with us her approach and how she came to learn the methods that worked best. She is also careful not to forget those students who already are readers and need their interest nurtured. It’s a gentle-hand sort of method that eliminates the struggle and fight to get kids to read and doesn’t forget those who already read well but struggle to enjoy classroom reading assignments.
Mrs. Miller goes into detail regarding different types of readers and how best to approach them. She emphasizes the necessity in making time in the classroom for reading and discusses the methods she uses with different students. Her logical approach in reviewing activities to eliminate busy work and ensure assignments are working as intended is impressive. I have no doubt that teachers across the nation want to implement these methods if they knew how to go about it and Mrs. Miller spells it out in easy to read narrative about her own experiences. I wish national guidelines would encourage Mrs. Miller’s methods rather than fight against the grain when it comes to getting kiddos to read!