Customer Reviews

Reading with Meaning

5 star:		(44)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

If you have dedicated yourself to producing thoughtful readers who read for meaning, this is the book you need! Not only is it filled with helpful lesson ideas, but the arrangement of each chapter follows a scaffolded approach to help young readers engage and develop as lifelong readers. Miller shows teachers how to lay out the entire year. Included in this book are chapters about schema building, mental images, inferring, questioning, non-fiction reading, and synthesizing. She focuses on one comprehension strategy in each chapter, including how to introduce it to students AND what children's books she considers "tried-and-true." At the end of each chapter, the author includes a list of children's book titles that all highlight the comprehension strategy perfectly for young children. I have purchased many of the titles that she recommends. All of the books are outstanding pieces of literature that children adore. Also, the lessons work well in a Reader's Workshop format. After instruction, students can get busy practicing reading from their own books by using what they learned right away. This book is an outstanding resource for any teacher!

There are certain "must have" books for teachers. This is one of them. Miller takes a decade of reading research (as synthesized by Pearson, et. al., 1992), and puts it into practice in her classroom. We move through the year with her, watching as she scaffolds for us and her students explicit reading instruction that truly works.

In Chapter 1, Miller goes straight to the crux of the matter: Gradually release responsibility to students; teach a few strategies of great consequence in depth over time; give students the gifts of time, choice, response, community, and structure.

Chapter 2 tells us how-and why-we should create a sense of community in the classroom. "Real classroom communities," writes Miller, "are more than just a look. Real communities flourish when we bring together the voices, hearts, and souls of the people who inhabit them." We must be "deliberate" in September if we are to create the type of environment in which growth and authentic learning will occur.

The Reader's Workshop is the topic of Chapter 3. Wait a minute, you may be saying, how does one have a "Reader's Workshop" when most of the students are not yet reading? "Readers' workshop in September," Miller writes, "is less about teaching children how to read and more about modeling and teaching children what it is that good readers do, setting the tone for the workshop and establishing its expectations and procedures, and engaging and motivating children to want to learn to read." And so Miller shows us, in detail, how we can go about this foundation-building. She begins with "Book Selection," then "Reading Aloud, Mini-Lessons, Reading and Conferring," and finally "Sharing."

With our solid underpinning in place we are now ready to settle in---the topic of Chapter 3. Here we learn how and why to give children choices when selecting books. Miller also discusses briefly phonics and word identification---two things that she believes should be taught side-by-side with comprehension strategies.

In the next two chapters Miller delves in depth into the comprehension strategies of schema and visualizing. She then devotes a chapter to "Digging Deeper." It is now January, she notes, and "[t]he time is right for increasing the sophistication of the read-alouds, showing them how to engage in more challenging dialogue and making connections from our past experiences to more in-depth learning." Timing, as they say, is everything. It is this type of knowledge and the ability to exploit the foundation that has been so carefully laid that makes Miller a teacher extraordinaire.

Chapter 8 through 10 are devoted to the remaining reading strategies of inferring, questioning, determining importance, and synthesizing. Miller includes numerous anecdotes, vignettes, lesson models, tips, techniques, and more. A list of references and a detailed index are included.

Practical and brilliant, this is one book that is definitely required reading for primary grade teachers.

Reviewed by the Education Oasis staff

In this book, Debbie Miller takes you inside the walls of her first grade classroom, leading you through the course of the school year where her students become independent and motivated readers. You can hear the excited buzz of the students as they discover meaning in their reading and thoughtfully discuss their findings with their peers. Her students are intrinsically motivated to learn from their reading as they simultaneously decode the text.

I highly recommend this book to any primary teacher looking for new strategies and techniques for teaching and modeling comprehension in their classroom. Debbie Miller gives fun and practical ideas that can be applied in most any grade. She supplies the reader with endless strategies for creating a collaborative and safe learning environment. Every page is packed full of inspiring stories and examples that will transform your teaching and questioning strategies. Don't let this book pass you by!

Debbie Miller is a magical teacher whom I have had the pleasure of observing. She has captured the details of what makes her such a great teacher in her book Reading with Meaning. It is the first resource I have found that truly helps me to visualize how I can teach all of the reading comprehension strategies in my first grade classroom. It also backs many of my current beliefs with Debbie's resources and well thought out rationales. I would highly recommend this book for any teacher who is ready for their primary kiddos to start interacting with and understanding what they are reading.

I have been an elementary teacher for over 20 years and I've spent 17 of those years working with struggling readers.
I wish this book had been written and published 20+ years ago. Debbie has detailed in this book the best way to teach children how to understand what reading is all about whether it is fiction or non-fiction.
Strategies are explained thoroughly from the beginning of the year to the end.
They are easy to follow and simple to implement.
This book is worth its weight in gold!!
You will not be disappointed.

This book is an excellent choice for any primary teacher! Her ideas are relevant for the first year teacher as well a teaching veteran. The goal of this book is to help educators get children active and involved in what they are reading. The chapters are set up in a logical progression from the beginning of the school year until the end. . The reader shares in this wonderful teachers joys, worries, and successes of the new school year. Her high yet attainable expectations for her students are inspiring. I plan on using several of Debbie's ideas in my classroom.

This book is geared towards teachers, but I think any parent who is interested in helping their child learn to read and love reading would also benefit from this book.

I'd read several books about reading comprehension, and had heard most of the terms used in this book - visualizing, predicting, connecting to the text, etc.... - but was still not completely comfortable with how I would translate those ideas into teaching practices for my children. Reading about how Ms. Miller implemented those ideas in her classroom was so enlightening!! What I would have given for a teacher like her 35 years ago.

Anyway, I used the ideas in this book, as well as the ideas in Jim Trelease's Read-aloud Handbook, to dramatically improve my own two children's reading comprehension. Now it is second nature to them (1st and 2nd graders) to visualize, predict, question, connect, etc... when they read or are read to. It is joyfully clear that they are truly constructing meaning from the texts - which is a far cry from where they were - my son in particular - a year and a half ago.

Now if I could just get their WRITING abilities to match their reading comprehension abilities....(hint to author)

I love this book. It was the last book that was offered to me during my masters work, and it was the best! I love the fact that it contains strategies that I can use with my 1st graders, including and especially with my ESOL students. I so often get books that offer strategies that say they are for grades K-12, and they are next to impossible to incorporate into a primary classroom (I think people forget that K-1 kids often are not yet reading). But this book it different, it does work in a primary classroom. I have used many of the strategies and they have proved successful with my students.

As a parent interested in improving my son's progress in reading, I began to search around for just the right book to help. In early June 2002 I purchased Debbie Miller's Reading with Meaning and educated myself. After gathering many of her great ideas and book recommendations, I began to "teach" my son during his summer break from school. I would recommend this book to any parent trying to make a difference. It was truly an eye-opener for both of us!

I teach 2nd grade and this is a wonderful resource to help teach reading comprehension. My student's comprehension skills have greatly increased and I've been teaching for 10 years. Debbie provides tons of examples and it is written in an easy to understand way. I would recommend for veteran and new teachers.