An hour of silent reading
It's time to read to yourself. Nothing should disturb the silence during this hour. The teacher should not check how the students work, or listen to them read aloud, or walk the class on their own business. I must say, children are more willing to do what is required of them when adults consider this activity to be extremely important and do it with their children. And it is better if during the hour of reading the teacher opens the book himself and sits down at the table.
If you know for a fact that they won't interrupt, it won't take long to read. But sometimes it is necessary to support the child, and when the children are not sitting still, the teacher should show will and tell them to be quiet. Children will get used to reading in silence if every day, at the same time, everyone around them reads quietly to themselves. Let this be a sacred hour, which will become a daily ritual and help to adjust to work. In some schools this hour is held at the same time in all classes. In other schools, teachers in some classes decide when to spend the reading hour.
Do you need complete silence during the reading hour?
The older we are, the more we like to read in silence. But younger children often talk during reading. They show each other something in the book, laugh, tell us what's next, evaluate the heroes, and play along. They are not irritated if someone else is doing the same thing. By demanding complete silence from them, we risk discouraging them from reading. At eight years old, having learned to enjoy reading, children begin to understand that in the hour of reading in the classroom there should be silence.
I once attended an independent reading class in the third grade. Some were sitting at desks. Others stretched out on the floor or settled in the corners. Three more sat down together, looking at a large book with illustrations and whispering about it. Someone read the same book for two. There was no perfect silence in the classroom, there was a quiet buzz, but it didn't bother anyone. The teacher read the novel and periodically looked up to the class to see if everything was okay. A couple of times in all twenty-five minutes, she walked around the classroom, checking on things she couldn't see from her desk, and only once made a remark to someone. At first, she looked at the child's broken heart. And when that didn't help, she raised her finger cautiously. He came to his senses and returned to the book.
It was in March. The teacher took the class in September. Before that, they had been taught poorly and had no time to read on their own, and all the other parts of the reading space I was telling you about on these pages, the guys didn't have any either. It took the teacher three months for the children to get used to the reading hour. Three months later, they began to express their dissatisfaction if something was interfering with this daily ritual.
Here's another brief account of the hour of reading in a small village school. The teacher took the junior grade, where there were children between the ages of eight and eleven.
«The "reading hours" have been going well since the first class. Juniors immediately grasp the picture books, and many of them so quickly flip through the pages and grab the next one that on the table next to them grow huge stacks of books. They don't want to share their personal meeting with anyone. But I think this behavior is forgivable if children only learn to choose, to read, to be among the books, if they are just beginning to realize reading as a socially significant occupation. When a child has the opportunity to read, he or she will soon become interested in books and benefit from this in the future. At the beginning of the year only two guys had difficulties. It was difficult for one girl to sit through twenty minutes of reading hours, and one boy was constantly choosing complex books. But they both adapted quickly and learned to read quietly during the reading hour» [From Howard Biggs' report, an Oxfordshire primary school teacher].
If I had been asked to name the mandatory reading environment conditions that would be necessary, if we wanted children to read, the hour of reading would have been one of the most important. Three other prerequisites: well-picked literature, reading aloud and talking about what the teacher has read (which I will discuss in detail in the second part of this book).
The most important of these four conditions is the hour of reading. Otherwise, what is the point of building a good library if no one reads it? What is the point of discussing a book if only a few people have read it? Reading out loud to children is, of course, valuable in itself (if only because it teaches them to read), but how many children will take up the book themselves?
It is clear that the hour of reading is the basis for all other reading objectives that the school has set itself. By the way, its quality can be judged by whether it has reading lessons and whether they are removed from the timetable for other subjects.
The End.