Choosing books to read and enjoy is at the heart of what it means to be literate. Our classrooms provide a learning community in which each child falls in love with books. Children taste the language and art of wonderful authors and illustrators and expand their worlds through books. When they walk into a classroom that features a library of appealing categories—authors, topics, illustrators, genres, award-winning books, or series—they learn that their days in school will include time and resources to nourish their hearts and minds. They learn that they will have the opportunity to read books they want to read, and they will develop their habits, tastes, and identities as readers. Children learn to read by reading, thinking, talking, and writing about reading. And the research is clear: Independent reading is unmistakably linked to student achievement (Reutzel et al., 2008).
All Roads Lead to Independent Reading
We envision a multitext approach, using different texts in different instructional contexts, to support independent reading. In this approach, students engage with
- High-quality children's literature that the teacher selects and reads aloud to the students.
- Beautiful, enlarged texts that students read together in a shared way.
- Short, high-quality, and leveled texts that the teacher selects for teaching small groups during guided reading.
- Engaging trade books that students choose to discuss in book clubs.
- Individual titles in a classroom library for students to choose for independent reading (organized by topic, author, genre, or some other characteristic, rather than by level).
A multitext approach is coherent because students work toward building a system of strategies for independent, proficient reading across each context (Fountas & Pinnell, 2017a). Students experience a variety of genres in different ways and bring all their understandings to the books they choose to read for themselves.
Essential Supports
Independent reading is personal, dynamic, and engaging. Students read daily and talk and write about their reading. To ensure this, consider the following actions as you create your classroom library and provide support for independent reading:
- Provide a range of high-quality fiction and nonfiction texts that will engage students.
- Organize the library and label the containers (such as baskets or tubs) in categories to help students search for books they want.
- Include easier-to-read and harder-to-read books in each basket.
- Give students choice. No one likes to read by "assignment" to "practice" reading, or to "get through" a level.
- Get students interested in the books. Use book talks to preview individual titles and ignite students' excitement to learn more about featured books.
- Make time for students to talk with peers about the books they are reading. Independent reading is both a solitary and social experience. When talking about texts, children develop their language and clarify and expand their understandings.
- Give students the opportunity to do some personal writing about their thinking, cued by texts. We strongly recommend asking students to keep a reader's notebook to record their thinking about the books they read and to keep track of the titles they have chosen.
Provide explicit minilessons to help students make good choices. Students learn to choose not by level but rather with attention to their self-knowledge as readers, their interests, and the genres they are exploring.
A Tool for Small-Group Teaching
We developed a gradient of texts (Fountas & Pinnell, 2017b) to help teachers select texts for small-group literacy instruction. The gradient is a ladder of reading difficulty points, with level A as the easiest level and level Z as the most difficult. For each level, we carefully examined the demands of texts on readers using . We linked these levels to approximate grade-level goals to give some perspective on how students might change in proficiency over time. So, text levels not only help teachers select books for guided reading but also help teachers measure children's progress along the continuum. The Text Level Gradient tool offers teachers a lens for understanding what makes different texts challenging and, consequently, how they can support readers with those texts. We do not suggest using levels to label children, organize libraries, or limit children's choices for independent reading.
Reading Without Labels
It's appropriate for teachers to use leveled texts to make their teaching specific, systematic, and powerful. But when it comes to independent reading, children need to make choices that reflect the way they see themselves as literate people, the way people do in real life (and that's not by a level). They may choose books on the easy side or reach for a more challenging text in which they have a compelling interest. Although we don't think it's productive for children to sit day after day reading something that is too difficult, we don't want to snatch books out of children's hands. Student interest outweighs level, above all.
Rather than relegate students solely to on-level books, teachers can help students become savvy book shoppers. Guide students to make good reading choices by discussing books in student–teacher reading conferences, through informal conversations and featured book talks, and by offering minilessons to scaffold their selection process and independent reading strategies. Imagine you are preparing your students to walk into a library or bookstore and choose books as you do—by saying, "I want to read that!"
After all, the amount of enthusiasm for independent reading is the real measure of a successful literacy classroom. The outcome is the child's confidence, agency, and engagement in independent reading for a lifetime.
