What Exactly are Kids Reading in those “Reading Blocks”?

Karin Chenoweth:

Whenever I hear about elementary schools that have cut out social studies and science instruction in order to devote 90 minutes or even two hours a day to reading instruction, my main question is, “What on earth are the kids reading for all that time?”
It’s a rhetorical question because I pretty much know what they are reading—they are reading folk tales, adventure stories, relationship stories, some humor (the author of Captain Underpants must be very wealthy by now). Sometimes they will read some non-fiction, but not usually in any kind of coherent fashion. The kids will read a story about butterflies and then one about bicycles and one about Martin Luther King, Jr. None of this is objectionable, but it is not providing them the real intellectual nutrition children need and crave—a carefully chosen course of reading in science and history that will allow them to understand those stories about butterflies and Martin Luther King, Jr.
The reading blocks kids have been sentenced to are not devoted solely to reading. They often spend an inordinate amount of time on “reading strategies,” which give me a headache just thinking about them—predicting, summarizing, outlining, making text-to-text connections, identifying the “purpose” of reading a particular work—the list goes on and on. Not that there’s anything wrong with any of them, but a little of them goes a long way. The countless hours that are being spent on reading strategies would be much better spent on building the store of background knowledge children need to be able to comprehend sophisticated text, including textbooks, newspapers, magazines, and all the things educated citizens are expected to be able to read.

Watch or listen to a recent Madison speech by Karin Chenoweth.

One thought on “What Exactly are Kids Reading in those “Reading Blocks”?”

  1. “The reading blocks kids have been sentenced to are not devoted solely to reading. They often spend an inordinate amount of time on “reading strategies,” which give me a headache just thinking about them—predicting, summarizing, outlining, making text-to-text connections, identifying the “purpose” of reading a particular work—the list goes on and on.”
    Good grief! What does Chenoweth think reading is if not “identifying the purpose”, “making text-to-text connections”? The last I heard, reading is not decoding but understanding.
    I thought it was settled that reading, after mastering decoding, was divided into three big stages: grammar stage, logical stage, rhetorical stage — what does the author actually say? is the work internally “true”? does the work fit within what the reader already knows?
    “Building the store of background knowledge” is what she demands of reading but she doesn’t want kids to waste their time actually doing it?
    Gives her a headache, does it? Thinking about what she reads gives her a headache? So must writing then, because there wasn’t much thinking going on when she slapped this piece together.

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