What About Homework?

If we want children to have literate lives, they need to experience, practice, and fall in love with reading outside of the school walls as well as within. We don't want them to view reading as an isolated activity that is just done within the confines of school.

We do stress that their outside of school reading should be for pure pleasure! We want all of our students to have selections that are perfect for snuggling on the couch or under the covers. Sometimes they borrow a book to read to a family member to show off a new skill. Sometimes they listen to mom or dad read aloud from a coveted book that is just a bit too hard to be read independently.

We encourage them to see how many different ways they are readers outside of school: Signs on the way home, recipes in the kitchen, cereal boxes at breakfast, the comics in the newspaper, etc. are all valid ways to engage with text.

Instead of assigning reading logs, reports, or assignments of any kind to "prove" they did their reading, we begin the morning sharing tidbits from our literate lives. Students love to talk about what they read, and often their chatter serves as commercials for others to discover new authors, series, titles, etc.