Melissa's Teacher Mall

Readicide by Kelly Gallagher

OMG! I threw out morning work. I've never told anyone, I have not even said it out loud, but after reading Readicide, I know it was the right thing to do.

In the first chapter of Readicide, Kelly Gallagher talks about how standardized testing has effected reading in our schools, and the fact that the struggling readers are the most affected. I teach in a Title 1 school, those struggling readers are my students.

I wanted to read Readicide by Kelly Gallagher when it was published a few years ago. Instead readicide was happening in my life. I was changing my resources to incorporate the standards. My district was moving to a basil reading program, and test prep was all the buzz. So I spent the summer planning, creating resources and making test prep the focus. What happened? I hated it, and the students hated it. One student even said, “Where is the fun work and the centers.” Wow that hit home.

So I needed to regroup. Ugh, what to do? We were 3 weeks into school and everyone was stressed. I needed to make a change and the sooner the better. We had a class meeting, what the students were communicating to me was they hated reading the same the stories in the basil program over and over again and they hated the worksheets.  So what could I change? I was pulling worksheets from the reading program as morning work. OK, I could change that.

I quickly decided to throw out morning work. We would use the time to read novels. I had packed away novels, you know, the novels that we were getting rid of because now we had this great new reading program. But they were packed away. I wanted to start now! So I decided to let the students have a free read time. They could pick any book they wanted and read. Just read, recreational reading, no work sheets, no test, no book reports. It would give me time to regroup.

This has really worked for me. We change our book every month. I still use free read, but I also have the class reading the same book. We have our special rotation, art, music, PE, etc., first thing in the morning. We have 15 minutes before they leave for their special rotation. One day a week we have 45 minutes. It is on this day that we discuss the book we are reading. We do some of the fun activities to go along with the book. When we have free read, students can share what they are reading or I conference with them. I love these conferences. I learn so much. 

Here is a fun book your students might like:

Hop on over to The Big Kids' Hall for more insight on Readicide