Teachers often point out to students what they need to learn and suggest activities that would benefit them, such as sustained reading for pleasure. But students don't always see their teachers actively demonstrating these skills.
This is not the case at Ymmersta School in Espoo, Finland, where I teach. Here, all the teachers are reading role models.
Ymmersta School currently serves approximately 200 students ages 6–12. The school employs 17 teachers and has approximately 20 students in each class. Its student population is rapidly growing. Ten percent of students are immigrants, coming mainly from Somalia, Russia, Albania, and Bosnia. Three special classes, each enrolling up to 10 students, cater to those with severe learning problems.
Students learn English as their first foreign language beginning in 3rd grade; they can also take French if they wish, beginning in 4th grade. One teacher teaches most of the subjects for his or her class, and reading is an integral part of all content taught.
Fostering a Love of Books
Teachers at Ymmersta School understand that making students eager to read depends more on a motivational learning environment than on a given reading program, and that motivated students will persevere with reading despite difficulties they may encounter along the way. Ymmersta makes a point of creating such an environment.
Every Friday, for example, the school holds a shared reading session for teachers and students alike, which lasts 20 minutes. The school also holds special reading weeks in autumn and spring, keeping a combined record of how many hours students have read during the week and celebrating the class that has read the most during that time. At our book evenings and story nights, teachers and students spend the whole night at school. Parents take part but go home at 10 p.m. During the evening, students attend workshops with writers, engage in story writing with their parents, and watch movies based on children's literature. Younger students listen to bedtime stories, whereas the older ones can spend the whole night reading if they choose.
Students also benefit from hearing adults in the school talk about books and reading. If teachers want their students to fall in love with books, they need to share their personal love of reading, treating their students as co-readers. For a school to develop good readers, it must provide access to high-quality books, and for this reason, our school library is the heart of the school.
Creating Motivated Readers
We encourage students to express their opinions about the books they read, even if their points of view differ from generally accepted interpretations. Students confirm the validity of their own experiences and cease to think of literature as something only a few gifted spirits can enjoy and understand.
As a teacher and reading curriculum director, I continually look for methods that combine the subjectivity and experientiality of reading with collaboration and discussion among students and teacher. Pair-work reading, literature circles, reading portfolios, and pairing reading with writing have proven invaluable to creating motivated readers.
Pair-work reading. In pair-work reading, students read the same book with a partner or in groups of four. Pair-work reading prepares the foundation in 1st and 2nd grade for literature circle reading, which begins in earnest in 4th grade. The teacher assigns students tasks that require collaboration. For example, pairs of 1st and 2nd graders might be asked to describe a book's main character in several words and discuss why they chose those words.
Literature circles. Students gather in small groups to read and discuss books of their own choosing. The tone is conversational, and students initiate discussion topics. The teacher serves as a facilitator rather than as an instructor. As students read, they enter their reflections in their journals, and these reflections often become the basis for group discussion.
Reading portfolios. Students keep a record of the books they have read each year, along with copies of what they have written during that period. By the time students reach year 6 (age 12), they have a substantial collection of material in their portfolios. During that year, students write a two- to three-page personal reading history titled Me as a Reader, which is based on the works they have included in their portfolios. They also interview their parents about their early years.
Pairing reading with writing. Each year, students publish their own books on the computer, scanning their own pictures into them. As students decide on the book they will write, they consider how other authors we have read have chosen their subject matter and where these authors have drawn their material from. They study the characters and milieus in a variety of books, along with the author's style and language. If a student decides to write a book in diary form, for example, he or she reads and studies journal-type novels to understand how the genre works.
Ymmersta School also makes reading visible throughout the building. All the facilities in our school are named after places in children's and young people's books, such as Hundred Acre Wood (from Winnie-the-Pooh), which refers to the wing of the school in which the preschool and 1st grades are situated. Rivendell (The Lord of the Rings) is the teachers' room, and Diagon Alley (Harry Potter) refers to a long corridor in which student work is displayed.
By focusing on such practices as these, Ymmersta School has created a community of readers and a motivational reading environment for all students that honors individual differences and abilities.
