Middle School Reading
Lake Braddock Middle School Book Club
The Lake Braddock Middle School Book Club is a open to all 7th and 8th graders!
Members read from the list of 10 nominated Virginia Young Readers Books and vote for their favorites in March.
Meetings are held the first Friday of each month during 'A' and 'B' lunches in the Faculty Dining Room. Club members enjoy food and fellowship and most importantly, great conversations about books.
HAVE YOU HEARD ABOUT B.E.A.R. TIME?
B.E.A.R. Time is a short time-span on Fridays during school when students are allowed to read materials of their choosing.
Students: Bring your books or reading materials every Friday!
Research shows that silent sustained reading programs may:
- improve reading comprehension
- increase enjoyment of pleasure reading
- increase reading outside of school
Pilgreen, J. L. (2000). The SSR Handbook . Portsmouth , NH : Heinemann.
Seven Reading Strategies to Improve Reading Comprehension:
Lake Braddock Middle School students are good readers and they're getting even better! Our Pyramid has chosen to teach seven reading strategies to help our students become independent, efficient, excellent readers. Reading instruction takes place in core classes as students learn to apply the reading strategies to their content classes. The seven strategies are:
- Make Connections
- Readers make connections by activating prior knowledge: text-to-self, text-to-text, text-to-world.
- Determine Importance
- Readers determine the most important ideas and themes. They learn to exclude peripheral or unimportant details.
- Readers ask questions of themselves, the authors and the texts as they use questioning to clarify and guide reading.
- Readers create visual images from text to make deepen understanding.
- Make Inferences
- Readers make predictions, draw conclusions, make critical judgments, and form interpretations.
- Readers retell or summarize what has been read to better understand and remember.
- Repair Comprehension
- Readers use a variety of fix-up strategies to repair comprehension when it breaks down.
How Parents Can Help Their Student
We need to keep our students reading: for fun, for joy, for background knowledge, for pleasure and…for improvement. Look at the results of a research study showing the correlation between standardized test scores and the amount of time students read for pleasure at home:
Standardized Test Scores:
Minutes Per Day Spent Reading:
What can a parent do to encourage reading?
- Provide books and magazines. Take your child to the library or book stores regularly. Surround your child with things to read. Be a step ahead. Your child should always be tempted with enticing things to read.
- Choice. Allow you child to choose his/her own books. Your middle school child will respond more favorably to reading if allowed choice in selection. Without guidance? No, but encourage choice when you can. And don't forget nonfiction. Some of our most reluctant readers love only nonfiction.
- Time. Provide quiet time to read.
- Be a reading role model. Share interesting facts you've learned from the newspaper, books or magazines.
*Anderson, R.C., Wilson, P., and Fielding, L. (1988). "Growth in Reading and How Children Spend Their Time Ourside of School." Reading Research Quarterly, 23(3), 285-303.