helping kids become lifelong readers

I just finished Reading in the Wild: The Book Whisperer’s Keys to Cultivating Lifelong Reading Habits by Donalyn Miller with Susan Kelley. Written by teachers, the book provides a lot of practical ideas about how to reposition reading instruction “around the habits and attitudes of lifelong readers.”

But there’s more to the book than classroom management strategies and lesson design, and I found much of it is relevant for parents, including the authors’ research findings about five characteristics lifelong readers share. They found that lifelong readers:

dedicate time to read

have reading plans

choose their own reading material

discuss books and their reading with other readers

show preferences for genres, authors and topics

I appreciated the ideas about how to help children develop in each of these five areas. It’s not surprising that one of the most important ways we do this is through modeling – and explaining our own processes to our children.