****** - Verified Buyer
4.5
We secondary (Grades 7-12) English teachers have a weakness and it's called reading. Oh, we're GREAT readers and love literature and know how to teach it (to avid and average readers). But throw a kid at us who struggles with reading (and we get them every year) and they're likely to fall through the cracks, because our solutions are rather simplistic. We say things like, "Read it again," or "Sound the word out," or "Look the word up." When they hesitate before a strange word while reading aloud, we give them the word. When they don't do the reading assignment, we watch them flunk our quizzes and wonder why they are so lazy.Enter Kylene Beers, with easily the best book I've read on the subject of struggling readers who are NOT of elementary age, but of middle and high school age. Yes, elementary teachers have reading specialists to fall back on, but in secondary schools, it is often either the English teacher who must intervene or no one. For Beers, the inspiration for writing this book was the number of former students she had who were condemned to "or no one" because she simply did not know what to do. For me (and probably legions of other teachers) her story will sound chillingly familiar. Fortunately, WHEN KIDS CAN'T READ: WHAT TEACHERS CAN DO is the antidote to our problems.In this book, Beers identifies the myriad of types of students who struggle with reading, and why. She provides practical strategies on how to intervene if your students struggle with comprehension, vocabulary, spelling, and word recognition/fluency/automaticity. There's also advice on how to help kids in responding to literature, as well as how to help them find a book that will tap into their interests.Each chapter includes an introduction and thorough definition of the problem, a section called "Step Inside a Classroom" which details real-life transcripts of kids having this exact reading difficulty, and a list of various strategies you can try -- even if it means having different groups with scaffolding activities within your language arts classroom. At the end of the book are appendices that include such helpful reproducibles as bookmark templates, common roots/prefixes/and suffixes, Fry and Dolch word lists, common phonics generalizations, 175 most common syllables in the 5,000 most frequent English words, word sorts, easily confused words, common spelling rules, and booklists for every type of reader. Can you say goldmine? This is the end of the rainbow, folks.I can't recommend this book enough to my fellow 7-12 English teachers. Reach out to your weak readers. Don't condemn them to a life of mediocrity (or worse) in literacy by assuming either it's their problem or they are beyond help. It's not and they aren't. Buy this book and put it to good use. This is where theory meets the road (called "practicality"). Be not only an English teacher, but a READING teacher (in every sense of the word).
