Pleasure Reading

Greetings from the Crowsnest as we stand on the threshold of our holiday break. Here is a great introduction to our pleasure reading assignment over Thanksgiving break. Please read a book—any book (Really! Any book!)—over the Thanksgiving week. There are many reasons why pleasure reading is good for you as a student. Improving your SAT scores is just one. One of my favorites is how I often assign such higher order thinking demands such as make an argument about what word or phrase illuminates the author’s tone. When you read a book for fun and the topic is meaningful, then you do that automatically. And the more you experience those moments while reading, the better you become at reading comprehension tests. As Will Smith (his mother was a teacher btw) claims, there are many other great reasons to be a reader and prepare for the test of life!

The only requirement for this assignment is that you enjoy the book! So be sure to select a good book. Ask friends and family for suggestions. You can ask me or anyone at the library, too. This book can be any length–just hav fun being pulled into a book!  We’ll start writing small book reviews (5-7 sentences) in class on the first day back of winter term; we’ll then peer-edit them the next day before we post them to the blog. Again, my goal is that you enjoy your book and get interested in reading other books than the ones I assign.  You can click on previous book reviews: https://digitalcrowsnest.wordpress.com/category/book-reviews/ What better source of information to find a good book than your classmates!  We’ll use this as a guide to help you compose a book review: http://teacher.scholastic.com/writewit/bookrev/read.htm