Readicide Blog Hop Week 4! Welcome back!

I'm on my way to Las Vegas today to go to the TPT Convention, but I'm still here reporting for Focused on Fifth on one of the most valuable books I've read in a long time: Readicide: How Schools Are Killing Reading and What You Can Do About It by Kelly Gallagher.

This week, we'll be discussing Chapter 4:

While last week dealt with the overteaching of books, this week discussed the underteaching of books.  You may be thinking, how can you underteach a book?~!!  Simple, you underteach by handing a difficult text to students with no framework or support.  I think this must be common in high school because I couldn't imagine underteaching a book in fifth grade.  Students still need a lot of support reading difficult texts, and many students are still learning how to read at this age.

Still the book brought up some interesting feelings for me.  I started asking myself, am I teaching the classics?  Am I challenging students with difficult literature?  For as long as I've been a student myself there are certain classics universally taught in many fifth grade classrooms (A Wrinkle in Time, The Witch of Blackbird Pond, Hatchet, Number the Stars,Where the Red Fern Grows, Johnny Tremain). I wondered which of these were considered challenging material.  Up until this point I've been reading fun books in class.  Anything that I enjoy and that gives me a chuckle is usually what I choose to read.  After reading this chapter, I'm mulling over these new thoughts about reading:

1. My class could be working on reading two books at time: one for pleasure and one for academic purposes.

2. I should provide my students with one recreational, fun- who cares about the reading level, text (perhaps one of my old silly favorites: I love Roald Dahl) and an academic text that is above their reading level in order to challenge them.

3. Which academic texts are appropriate for, yet above a 5th grade level?

 4. I need to find more informational texts in order to do research and close readings with my students.

I thought a lot about #3 on my list last night.  I spent many hours researching academic texts for 5th grade and I compiled this short list for possible reads for next year:

The Secret Garden

Still More Two-Minute Mysteries

 Treehouse Tales

 A Long Way From Chicago

100 Cupboards

I've read Two-Minute Mysteries before and I must say the British verbiage was challenging for my understanding sometimes.  Like Gallagher brings up in this chapter though, just like going to a museum as a kid, it's good to for your mind to stretch and be confused by the classics.  It causes good reading habits to form.  I'm thinking of using the Still More Two-Minute Mysteries as a part of my critical thinking corner.  Kids LOVE them, and they are quite challenging to read and understand.

After researching new reads, I started analyzing the books I currently use in my reading instruction. I'm quite happy with The Phantom Tollbooth and The City of Ember as academically challenging texts.  I would like to find more dealing with Early Explorers and the American Revolution.  It seems there are a lot of texts dealing with the Great Depression and WWII, but I know I barely finish The Civil War (history wise) by the end of 5th grade. I would prefer to read cross-curricular books that will enhance the 5th grade social studies focus areas for my class, so if you know of any that I should check out please drop their titles in my comment box!

Well, I hope to see you back here next week for our group's wrap up of Readicide. I can't believe how reading a good book can make summer go by so quickly! :)

If you have the chance, please hop over to my fellow blogger's recap on Chapter 4!  She has a beautiful blog with a lot of interesting things to say about the best academic practices!

Until next week, take care blog readers!