Reading Is Our Business: How Libraries Can Foster Reading Comprehension

Motivating children to read is essential to building a lifelong love of reading. Many parents cannot model engagement with books and instead, teachers, school media specialists, and children's librarians must step into the breach to help children embrace a love of reading. According to award-winning librarian-educator and author Sharon Grimes, to help students love books and reading, their skills must go beyond merely recognizing words and turning pages without comprehension. She frames the situation with an insightful overview of current research on reading and how children learn. "Reading Is Our Business" then outlines a unique seven-step reading strategy. Each step is illustrated by actual classroom examples teaching students how to understand what they read and is supplemented with age-appropriate author and book lists. Strategies to enhance reading comprehension include: Connecting; Visualizing; Questioning; Finding Answers; Determining Importance; Inferring and Predicting; and, Synthesizing. Sample worksheets and websites make the process easy to use and replicate, and help break down reading comprehension into its component parts for learners for whom this doesn't come naturally. As young people engage with books, they develop connections with their own lives and lay the foundations for logical thinking and more learning. Following these practical guidelines, librarians can continue to foster this community of readers and thinkers.