The Book Whisperer

The Book Whisperer: Awakening the Inner Reader in Every Child by Donalyn Miller

Reading this book made me want to be a language arts teacher. Donalyn Miller's passion is to create life readers...students who grow to love and enjoy reading for reading's sake both in and outside the classroom. How does she do it? By allowing students to read. It seems like common sense, but in many classrooms today, children spend time on worksheets, vocabulary lists, and test prep rather than with their nose in a book. Miller's students on the other hand spend at least a portion of every class session reading. What's more, her students are reading books that they have chosen, something that most students never get the chance to do in any classroom. Thanks to these simple but profound strategies, Miller's students become able and avid readers and score well on tests.

I found it inspiring to read about a classroom filled with books where students are actively involved in selecting what to read, sharing recommendations with classmates, discussing books with their teacher, and spending lots of uninterrupted time reading. I want to be in that class. I identify with the students that Miller describes as "underground readers," those who "just want to read and for the teacher to get out of the way and let them." As a middle schooler, I carried around the obligatory stack of textbooks and notebooks. Perched a top these "school" books was my "just for fun" book - the one that I would pick up to read the moment my assignments were finished or the teacher stopped lecturing and gave us a few minutes free time before the bell rang. Miller's class and her twenty minutes or so of free reading time every day would have been heaven for me.

While The Book Whisperer is written for an audience of educators, it has a lot to offer me as a librarian, mom, potential homeschooler, and reader. I love the way the author takes on the role of fellow reader and master reader rather than just reading teacher in her classroom. As my kids grow, I hope that our home becomes a reading community where we share book recommendations and discuss books with one another as easily and enthusiastically as Miller and her students.

Miller mentions that her students "preview" lots of books. She is constantly making preview stacks on the desks of individual students and encouraging them to choose the ones they'd like to read. I suppose I do this to some extent when I browse the library shelves, but I love the idea of taking home a stack of books with the intention to actually read only a couple from cover to cover. In a way, I suppose Miller has given me permission to read the back, jacket flaps, and first few pages of a book without committing to the entire thing. I'd like to do this for my children as well. I'd also like to get to know their reading preferences and personalities so well that I can create really good preview stacks for them, just as Miller does for her students.

Miller's passion for reading oozes from the pages of The Book Whisperer, and I'm guessing it is very evident to her students as well. They can't help but catch the reading bug when they are being guided by a book lover, literally surrounded by books, and given the freedom to enjoy reading every day. If I ever become a teacher, this is the type of environment I want to provide for my students. In the meantime, I'll settle for growing book lovers here at home.