I’m grateful to you and Doug for continuing to post about your progress. It makes for good reflections for the rest of us.

I am looking forward to following the Art of Reading journey across the school year and predicting that out of it will come many success stories.

I have serious concerns about what school districts (including my own) are doing to promote Readicide. It’s hard to convince districts that just because they are paying for a program (think Accelerated Reader) doesn’t mean they can’t let go of it. I hate it when I visit school sites on a Fun Friday, for instance, and find that the detention group (those who don’t get to participate in the Fun Friday activities due to behavior issues or failure to complete homework – such as being ready to take their AR quiz) are actually being punished with reading.

So right off the bat, a selling point for The Art of Reading is that, other than providing students with books, there are not cost:-).

Much of my day is spent in Title I schools, so one of my goals for the year, motivated by Kelly Gallagher’s writing, is to find more ways and sources for giving, as opposed to just loaning, books to students. I’m very impressed with the literacy difference, for example, epals.com’s in2books is making for a group of title 1 4th and 5th grade students, who get to keep their books.

Thank you for sharing this project and for continuing to raise so many important questions.

One of the challenges I felt in workshop with 4th and 5th graders was my lack on knowledge of many of the books they were reading. I would conference with students and, if I didn’t know the book, I would feel lost in regards to helping them as readers. I would think that would be even more true as kids get older. (It’s not an issue in first grade. We have completely different challenges!) I’d be curious to hear about the ways you both address the huge variety of reading choices I would guess you are seeing.