At Sussex, we believe that the surest way to develop a love of books is through the enjoyment of high-quality imaginative literature. Our primary goal is to help all students become deeply engaged with their reading. We strive to teach our students to build the confidence and skills they need to become independent, life-long readers.
Sussex students read with a variety of aims and intentions. Our students read to broaden their vocabularies and to improve their overall reading skills. They strive to become faster and more fluent readers, to be purposeful, engaged, and critical in their relationships with the written text. They read to stretch their imaginations, to escape to other lives in different times and places. They read to become informed about the world and how it works. And they read to become better people: knowledgeable about and compassionate toward diverse human experiences.
Reading Workshop
Each group of students, K-8, meets four to five times a week for reading workshop. At the start of many reading workshops, the teacher (or a student) presents a reading mini-lesson in which information about skill development, reading strategies, and the nature and purpose of literature are taught. At the beginning of the school year, these mini-lessons provide opportunities to set expectations and establish procedures for daily work. As the year progresses, mini-lessons provide opportunities to teach reading skills and strategies.
After a mini-lesson, students choose their own books and begin to read. The teacher moves among the students and has reading conferences in which the teacher provides instruction, asks questions, records observations, makes assessments, and discusses literature with the student.
Independent reading provides an opportunity for the reader to practice reading strategies independently, read a text at his or her level, increase fluency, solve words independently, and simply enjoy himself or herself.
Mini-Lessons
Teachers help students develop a repertoire of reading skills and strategies through mini-lessons, 5-15 minute focused lessons typically taught at the beginning of reading workshop.
• For readers in K-3, mini-lessons include such approaches as developing phonemic awareness—the ability to hear and manipulate sounds in words. With emergent readers, this practice does not involve print. We practice phoneme segmentation, rhyming, counting syllables, singing, sound isolation, and word stretching. Over time, the child moves into letter manipulation with tiles or magnetic letters, forming syllables, nonsense words, and eventually full words. Students are taught to look at first and last letters, and to identify rhyming patterns or smaller words within bigger words. Afterwards, students are asked questions about whether their predictions look right, sound right, and make sense.
• In grades 2-5, reading strategies and skills might include: making predictions about the outcome of the story; describing characters and settings; identifying the conflict in a story; re-reading; devising strategies to decode words; alphabetizing; discovering new authors and genres; talking about an author’s craft; being asked to introduce ideas for reader’s responses; and learning how to select appropriate and motivating books.
• In grades 6-8, reading mini-lessons might include: articulating connections between one text and another, between a text and a reader’s knowledge of the world, or between a text and the student’s own life; discussing themes of individual works; drawing on reading in student writing; learning how to use literary reference materials; discovering the literary elements of different genres, such as novels, essays, short stories, and free-verse poetry; identifying various narrative structures; becoming familiar with new authors; engaging in critical reading and literary current events; and introducing authors and genres.
Reading Conferences
Our teachers strive to establish ongoing, lively dialogues with students about their reading, with the goal of developing a detailed knowledge of each child’s strategies, strengths, needs, tastes, and intentions as readers. As they confer with each student during the reading workshop, teachers will ask the student to read aloud, both to evaluate the student’s reading strategies, and to determine whether or not the difficulty level of a particular book is appropriate to the reader. Teachers frequently help students choose appropriate books, and make recommendations to students who are reading inappropriate titles; they also check regularly to determine whether or not a student is reading each night at home. Teachers assess the needs and tastes of each individual student, with a keen eye for the student’s particular developmental level.
Read–Alouds
Read-alouds are an integral part of our reading program in all grades. Teachers choose selections from a variety of genres, with the aim of providing students with a range of potential models for their own writing.
Read-alouds build vocabulary, improve listening comprehension skills, broaden language experience, and expand knowledge. Teachers demonstrate techniques and strategies of good readers by “thinking aloud” about the book: asking questions that promote reflection and prediction, making connections, self-correcting, acquiring vocabulary, and analyzing. Read-alouds provide important shared literary experiences while prompting students to think about how they wish to live their lives.
Introducing Books and Authors
Throughout the school year, teachers create book displays of new titles and authors, with the intent of highlighting particular literary genres, styles, and sensibilities. Teachers and students in grades 4-8 present “book-talks,” in which they highlight and share their responses to favorite works.
Readers Responses
Students learn different ways to respond to their reading, either through written responses or oral presentations. Students in grades 4-8 maintain a written dialogue with their teacher about their reading; the students write to their teacher about their reading, and the teacher writes back, prompting the student with further questions.
Reading Homework
At-home reading practice helps students become more fluent, confident, independent readers. All Sussex students have reading homework. Each weekday afternoon every student leaves Sussex with a take-home book bag (1st-3rd) or backpack (4th-8th) containing one or more books to be read at home; students are then expected to bring these books back to school the next day for reading workshop. Kindergarten students begin to take home a book bag sometime in January. Depending on the child’s age and reading level, the child may listen to the book read aloud, read to or with an adult or sibling, or read independently. Essential to the success of at-home reading, parent help and encouragement allows students to make great strides in reading each year.
Other Components to Reading at Sussex
Shared Reading: As a class, students and teachers read aloud together with a shared text such as a big book, poem, song, or morning message. A fun, social reading activity, shared reading is designed to create a body of known texts that students can subsequently explore further on their own.
Guided Reading: Teachers sometimes work with smaller groups or individuals as they read aloud. The teacher supports the text by offering help to students as they read the text, asking comprehension questions, initiating predictions, teaching strategies, and offering spontaneous mini-lessons. Teachers also guide, demonstrate, and make informal assessments with anecdotal records.
Reader’s Theatre: Through Reader’s Theatre, students have a shared reading experience in which either a small group or the whole class reads a text that has been divided into several dramatic parts. Usually this involves drama performance and expressive reading.
Literature Circles: Literature circles provide students with the opportunity to read selected texts in a book-club format. Working in groups, students choose books they want to read (according to their reading level), set reading goals, determine areas of focus, and arrange meeting times to discuss the book.
Phonics (letter/sound correspondence) Instruction: Phonics skills are taught as needed during guided reading sessions, shared reading, or word work time.
Assessment: Students are informally assessed on a regular basis. Teachers privately check-in with students often, asking students to read out loud to them, review sight words, or speak about a book they are reading. Students in grades K-2 are assessed with DIBELS. This provides an ongoing evaluation that focuses on the following reading components: phonemic awareness, accuracy and fluency, comprehension, vocabulary, and the alphabetic principal. This assessment helps guide specific reading instruction. If a student is not making progress, further investigation and a meeting with a teacher and parents, along with the resource teacher, will take place. A plan will be created to support a student in this instance.
Teacher as Reader: The teacher shares his or her reading life with students, both to reinforce class instruction and to demonstrate positive reading habits. This is an opportunity to echo the lessons taught and to model for students what good readers do.
Book Collections: Book collections are organized to make them most accessible to the appropriate readers. Teachers spend considerable time researching, reading, and buying appropriate books for their learning group.
Reading Across the Curriculum: Sussex’s reading program emphasizes literacy across the curriculum. The school uses few commercial programs, workbooks, or worksheets. For example, students read about science and history by reading materials gathered by their teacher, as well as by exploring nonfiction sources from our classroom libraries, the public library, and the Internet. Spanish and French instruction is conducted along similar lines, as students explore the fundamentals of the reading experience as it relates to a foreign language.
Reading: How Parents Can Help
From the first day of school, we make time for looking at books, listening to books, talking about the ideas and people in books, learning how to read books, and reading books. We offer students the most generous invitations we can devise to help them fall in love with books, see themselves as readers, spend significant time reading, and grow strong as readers. We know that the richness of their early experiences as readers will serve them well for a lifetime, and we look forward to partnering with you as grown-ups who nurture readers.
Everyone Has Reading Homework
Research shows that the highest achieving students are those who devote leisure time to reading, even when the school day and year are only mid-length and homework isn’t excessive. Recently, the largest-ever international study of reading, Pisa 2003, found that the single most important predictor of academic success--more significant, even, than a student's economic or social status--is the time children spend reading books. The study also revealed that the amount of time children devote to pleasure reading is one of the few reliable predictors of high achievement in math and science.
There is no substitute for regular, sustained time with books. At Sussex, we encourage you to sit down with your children and discuss the best time and place for reading to happen at your house. Is after school or before dinner a good point for your child to catch his or her breath, curl up with a book, and escape into a great story? Or will your child join the booklovers who like to read themselves to sleep at night? And when reading happens, is the room quiet? Is the TV off? Is there a good light? These environmental factors are critical in establishing positive reading habits in the home.
We’ve learned that the choices of books available to kids today are so wonderful that reading makes for joyful homework. We’ve also seen that children whose parents and teachers expect and encourage them to read are likely to become readers.
Reading Aloud
Your child is never too old to be read to; at Sussex we read aloud to our students all the way through eighth grade. Children of every age cherish the literary worlds that adults bring to life with their voices. The bonds of closeness that are created when a grown-up and a child enjoy a story together are one of the best things about being a parent.
Final Thoughts
Your child may select an overnight book with content or themes that you question. While we think it’s important that children choose what they read, we also understand that a family's values play a central role in this decision. If a book bothers you and you feel strongly about it, ask your child not to bring it home, explain why, and talk with his or her teacher. The teachers have selected books for our libraries with many criteria in mind, from classic literature, to books that offer predictable language and story structures, to award-winning illustrations to cross-cultural themes to contemporary social issues We are always willing to discuss the merits we have found in a particular title, but we also want to support you if you have concerns about the book choice your child has made.
Because we use children’s literature to teach reading, we count on our books being available to us each day. And because our collection of children’s books represents a substantial investment of both school funds and the financial contributions of our teachers, we’re discouraged when books disappear for weeks at a time or never reappears at all. You can help by checking your child's bookbag or backpack each weekday morning to be certain that your child has a book to return, or to continue reading, that day at school. And please scan your children’s bedrooms from time to time for books that belong to the school or one of the teachers. We appreciate you making sure the Sussex library remains intact.
Finally, please realize that your children don’t “take a break from reading” during school vacations. Research shows that the reading levels of students who stop reading during the summer drop an average of six to twelve months between June and September. Frequent, enjoyable, year-round experiences with books are critical to a child's reading development.
Each fall, we hope that you will help your child establish or reestablish school routines; this process includes creating a schedule and a space for homework. As students move up in grades, and become acquainted with new teachers, they will need to adjust to new routines and expectations in all areas, from weekly spelling assignments to nightly reading.
In September please sit down with your children and ask them to participate in decisions about where and when homework will be done this year. Then, throughout the year, help them budget their time and plan ahead to accommodate extracurricular activities. Insist on quality work and quality time.
Each evening ask your child what he or she did today and what needs to happen to prepare for tomorrow.