Episode 37: Five(ish) Simple Strategies for Building Reading Stamina
Do you dread those days when you’re expecting your students to read in class? If your students don’t like to read: not independently, not collectively, not at all, it’s likely they lack reading stamina. They can’t stay focused on a text for any length of time, they’re easily distracted, and those who are easily distracted distract others.
As people who love to read, we would love to turn all our students into readers, and we do work hard to get our students to at least give reading a chance, but we also have a lot of other things we need to accomplish as well.
While it may feel like an uphill battle to turn a nonreader into a reader at the high school level, we can make progress by helping them improve their reading stamina. Ever the realists, though, we also think sometimes needs must, and you need to meet students where they’re at in order to make any reading-based progress throughout the school year.
Building Reading Stamina and Making It Work
- Using audiobooks and coloring pages
- Regular independent reading time (whether it’s a day or a small amount of time each day)
- Make reading stamina the focus of a novel unit. Keep the activities simple and streamlined so you can focus on getting through the book together.
- Read together and stop to talk about it frequently (you can model your thinking, but more importantly, you can help remove the barrier that results when students struggle to comprehend the text).
- First Chapter Friday to build interest in engaging books
Be sure to check out the episode for our full discussion on each of these points. We promise we have a good reason for using coloring pages (and fully admit it might be part of “making it work,” but it does make it work).