Vocabulary work for the reluctant reader

I've posted before on the fact that many of our students have small vocabularies and that this hampers their reading comprehension.  (You can read that post here.)  By far the best way to increase your vocabulary is to read a wide variety of materials - particularly books or articles at a challenging reading level.  I have also posted on the fact that it is difficult to get students to actually do this.

Vocabulary building needs to begin - well, from birth really.  However, college bound students should consciously work on their vocabularies beginning no later than middle school.  How can you get a reluctant reader to work on his or her vocabulary without reducing it to rote memorization?  Comic books can be a great method.  Calvin and Hobbes is a great comic series with some terrific vocabulary words in it.  It appeals to everyone age 10 and up.  The artist, Bill Watterson, has retired, but compilations of the strips are still in print.  You can also find them online.

I recently discovered another great vocabulary-building book series.  Stephan Pastis, who draws the nationally syndicated comic strip "Pearls Before Swine", has also written a series of books about an elementary school character, Timmy Failure.  The series is aimed at students in late elementary school, but I have enjoyed them, and I'm 53.  These chapter books are in the style made popular by the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series. "Pearls" doesn't tend to be filled with SAT-level words, so imagine my surprise and delight when I encountered the following in the first Timmy Failure book, Mistakes Were Made:  rigorously, depiction, alleviated, stipulations, assent, prudent.  And that was just the first 50 pages!  Each book in the series is entertaining - a quick, easy read.  Unlike Calvin and Hobbes, which some children would need to read with a dictionary, many of the words in the Timmy Failure books are defined by the characters as you go, although in both series you could get the basic gist of many words from their context.

These books make great holiday gifts!  

Use the summer for reading!

I tell my students that it is most time-consuming to raise their scores on the reading sections of the college entrance examinations because they need to read.  A LOT.  Then I tell them that summer is the perfect time to work on this.

This is my annual post to encourage reading.  I was inspired to get off my duff and write this year's edition by this article.

The article looks at what students are reading.  There is good news and bad news.  The good news:  reading is not dead.  Quite a few kids are reading and some of them read quite a bit.  The bad news:  too many kids read hardly anything, and when they do read, they choose books that are written at an easy reading level.

The article includes a plea for students to read the classics and includes an argument for a students reading list to include both fiction and non-fiction.  It points out that raising your reading level requires work - which is probably why kids are avoiding it - but that when students make the effort they enjoy the more difficult books.

Here's the thing.  Students who read regularly and who can comprehend material at a 11th grade level or higher will have a tremendous advantage on their college entrance exams, in college and later in life.  For a quick-and-dirty estimate of the reading level of a piece of writing, see this previous post.

READ, dangit!

There exist SAT and ACT tutors who fill out a form after the test outlining for parents why the student didn't get the score they wanted.  I think it's a CYA thing, and I can see the motivation, but it seems a bit mean.  However, if I DID fill out such a form, "Doesn't read enough" would be one of the check-boxes.  "Didn't do what I told him to" would be another, and for many students this would amount to the same thing.

Students (and their parents) are told the importance of reading over and over again.  We all know we should be reading, but many people -- teenagers in particular -- don't.  Even if a student is a big reader, sometimes they don't read a wide enough variety of texts.  How many times have you heard, "They can read ANYTHING! It doesn't matter!  Find something they enjoy!"  This is only true up to a point.  When it comes to college readiness, the ability to read non-fiction at a college level is crucial.  However, you can't count on colleges to teach the student how to do this.  They expect their students to arrive already reading at a college level.  In fact, college entrance exams are specifically intended to measure the ability to do this.  High schools haven't traditionally done such a great job either.  They tend to focus on the types of fictional reading the practice of which will come in handy if you major in English Lit.  The Common Core Standards are supposed to address this issue.  We'll see.

When I get a student who needs work in the reading section, I usually assign reading homework.  I send home articles that were written "for grownups."  The students get to choose what to take home, although I encourage them to choose articles on topics they know little about rather than articles they think they would enjoy.  This is the homework that is least likely to get done.  I'm not sure why.  Is it because they can't bring themselves to read "boring" stuff?  Is it because they don't see the immediate connection between the assignment and improving their test scores?  Is it because the improvement is not as immediate or obvious?

An aside--  If you are reading this, and you are one of my current students:  I can tell when you didn't really read the article.  I may have chosen not to embarrass you, but I know.

Usually when a child's reading score is low, it's because he really doesn't read all that well.  You can't fix that without reading.  So, READ, dangit!

Check back tomorrow for some specific reading suggestions.

It's not too early to work on your critical reading skills for the fall tests

If you plan to take the SAT or the ACT in the fall of 2013 (or even later) it is not too early to work on your critical reading skills. I know that parents and teachers are telling students to read as much as possible and they're right. But don't read just anything. Read books and periodicals that are written at a higher reading level.

Here is a quick way to approximate the reading level of a book or article based on the SMOG index:

First mark off 30 sentences. I generally like to choose 10 sentences at the beginning of the reading, 10 in the middle and 10 near the end.  Within those 30 sentences, count all of the words with 3 or more syllables.  Take the square-root of that number and add 3. The result is the approximate grade level of the reading material.

The SAT and ACT were designed to measure whether or not you could read at the college level, so you can expect the reading levels for the various passages to be 11th grade or higher.  By contrast, popular series like Harry Potter and The Hunger Games are written at a middle school level.

Use this method to find reading material at a good reading level for practice. THEN read as much as possible!