Reading Reconsidered, literacy instruction for teachers and parents

I’m a teacher. Once you’ve worked as a teacher you’re always a teacher. When my wife and I became parents we immediately started reading to our children. We also did the other parenting tropes like playing classical music, labeling key things in the house and saying Jumanji to make the dirty diapers disappear. Unfortunately that last one never did work. It’s in the vein of my prior profession that I wanted to read Reading Reconsidered.

Obviously we want our kids to read, but more importantly we want to enjoy reading and we want them to want to read.  Reading Reconsidered is not about Common Core per se. Anything about education and public/government schools has potential to be controversial. However, this book is strictly about education and the ‘Core of the Core’ as they call it to teach more effectively and setting up children for success.

As you might have guessed, Reading Reconsidered is one the wonky side of books. It’s nonfiction, educational and has countless sources or links designed for readers to go out and pass said knowledge around. However, the book is palatable, enjoyable and fun to read, even if you haven’t jumped into a text book since high school.

Ugh, is this really a text book that I enjoyed? Reading Reconsidered straddles the line between text book and self help. As a parent it’s good to read because it teaches you best practices to help your child read. This could be done by asking better questions, choosing better books, teaching methods and countless other things that sound technical, but are really common sense practices that anyone can do at home.

One very simple  example that the book has is a student who is trying to say the word “inspection”, but pronounces it in-SPEAK-tion.  One teacher tells the student what they did wrong and then asks them to read the word again. The second teacher simply says the work incorrectly, just like the student did, but in the form of a question, ‘in-SPEAK-tion?’.

It turns out there are teaching methods and terms for this. We’ve always done this at home but thought of it as the path of least resistance. The more words I use to correct the situation means the more time before our young student can correct it themselves. For the education wonks in the crowd it’s called controlling the game and decoding.

There are lots of other methods that will either subconsciously or overtly help you help your young reader. You don’t have to be a teacher to enjoy this book, but in order to make the best use of it you’ll have to actually do some of the things and examples that they mention.  If you’re a teacher some of the methods mentioned will be familiar. If not, don’t fret, they’re presented in a way that will help you challenge your young reader with a variety of texts, plus the comfort food reading that they inherently want.

The takeaway from Reading Reconsidered is not always read non-fiction, Shakespeare or books that your parents found boring. It acknowledges that young readers will want to read the dystopian novels about fighting for food, handsome vampires and other movies that have Sia in the soundtrack. It shows you ways and the benefits that can come from embracing new and more challenging books.