Killing two birds with one stone - Reading for engagement.

With the curriculum getting more and more packed each year, it gets harder and harder to prioritize what teachers can bring to their classroom.  Teachers are slowly but surely losing the ability to choose the elements of their Student's education as they have to "pack in" everything they are supposed to teach in an efficient way.  The "extras" are slowly going by the wayside and modern students are missing out on a lot of what we used to get in schools.

While Teachers scrabble to educate their students in a way that gets them reading, writing and composing? It's getting harder and harder to find the time to make it a priority to give them a passion for books and a love for reading for the simple enjoyment of it.  I get around this by killing two birds with one stone and using my favourite books to engage with my students as a basis for a lesson rather than using books purely as a teaching aid.

Reading to engage is a little different from reading to settle a class.  Reading to settle a class is about focusing their attention away from playground issues and giving their bodies time to stop giving out all the chemicals that make them jumpy and excited for example (although this isn't the only time when it's a good idea).  Reading to engage is a little different in that it is to grab their attention and get them personally invested in the subject matter to provide self-motivation for the following lesson.

Of course Engagement is a very important tool for CRTs as we need a solid way to overcome the fact that we are an "invader" into the classrooms we work in.  We are an immediate excuse for the students to once again start testing boundaries to see what they can get away with.  Keeping them engaged with their work is a very effective method to steer them away from testing those boundaries, they are so busy with something else that it just gives so little time for it to occur to them to try and step over one or two. This doesn't mean that this isn't also an excellent way to get instilling a love of literature back into regular classrooms!

While this is a support video for my one-book lesson plans (I will make a "non advertising" version of this video for the Wodonga CRT Support Network YouTube Channel as soon as time permits and replace the one that's here) it shows the key aspects of reading to engage as opposed to reading to settle a class.

Watch this video on YouTube!

The beautiful part about using books in this way is that they are used for "justifiable educational purposes" when it comes to what you have to prioritize when planning your lessons but it's also a step back in time to when it was also easy to make instilling a love of literacy and books in our students a priority too.

Regards,

Mel.