Right before the Christmas holidays, Mesquite librarians did an online book study. We used a Goodreads group to discuss The Book Whisperer: Awakening the Reader in Every Child by Donalyn Miller. This book motivated many of our group to make a concerted effort to read every day in 2011 – me included. It reminded us that if we want our students (and teachers) to be readers, we have to model reading and talk about reading with them.
To help me keep my personal commitment, I have joined my first ever reading challenge – the Centurions of 2011 on Facebook! This group, created by Paul W. Hankins, is “a group of readers who have set a goal to read 111 or more books during the year 2011. Members will be posting month by month their titles, highlighting at least one pick to total twelve favorites for 2011. All genres accepted from picture books to poetry anthologies to professional texts.”
I’m keeping track of what I read on Goodreads – you can see my profile here.
If 111 books sounds like too many, Goodreads also offers a 2011 reading challenge, where you can set your own goal and track what you read using their site.
With all of the things that capture our attention these days, sometimes plain old reading just gets lost in the shuffle – even for book-loving people like librarians – and it’s something that shouldn’t be lost. As Donalyn Miller writes in her blog post about reading challenges:
…how many books you read isn’t really the point. Reading every day, whether it is a stack of picture books, 30 pages of an adult novel, or a section of that professional book you know will influence your paradigm–making a daily commitment to read is what matters–both to our teaching and our personal lives.
Won’t you join me in making a commitment to read every day in 2011?
March 9, 2011 is World Read Aloud Day. This global rally shows the world that the right to read and write belongs to all people and lets the children of the world know that words and stories have the power to change lives.
