5 Essential Literacies for Students: Part 1 Reading Literacy

Posted on June 15, 2019 by Barbara Paciotti

When we become a School Librarian we don’t stop being a Teacher, in fact, we take on a larger responsibility: to teach the Essential Literacies that are so important in our global society. As I’ve mentioned before, our students need and deserve short, simple lessons that inculcate these multiple literacies through integration with subject area classroom activities.

Literacy is no longer just knowing how to read and write, so for every class visit to the library we need to integrate at least one Essential Literacy component with the classroom topic of study. In our complex, information-rich, culturally diverse world, students need to understand and be proficient in these Five Essential Literacies:

Reading and Writing (the original literacy)
Content-area Literacy (thinking specific to a discipline)
Information Literacy (the library curriculum)
Digital Literacy (when and how to use various technologies)
Media Literacy (published works—encompasses all other literacies)

Let’s address each of these literacies through a separate blog post where I offer suggestions how School Librarians might incorporate that literacy into lessons. With this post I begin with what is still considered the most important literacy in our modern world: reading with the associated ability to write.

WHY READING LITERACY IS IMPORTANT

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) evaluates education systems worldwide by testing the skills and knowledge of 15-year-old students in ~70 countries. In their Program for International Student Assessment Report of 2003 they state:

The single most important predictor of academic success is the amount of time students spent reading, and this is a more accurate indicator than economic or social status. Time spent reading was highly correlated to success in math and science. The keys to success lie in teaching students how to read and then have them read as much as they can.

Their 2009 PISA report refines this by stating:

Having a deep understanding of reading strategies, and using those strategies, are even stronger predictors of reading performance than whether students read widely for pleasure.

Clearly the ability to read with discernment is the key to success in school, as well as the key to all other literacies. Our National School Library Standards give this definition, with the focus on the medium/format rather than the process:

Text literacy: the ability to read, write, analyze, and evaluate textual works of literature and nonfiction as well as personal and professional documents.

So, clearly reading and writing literacy are within our bailiwick. So, how might we, as School Librarians, make reading a key objective in our library program?

INTEGRATE READING IN LIBRARY VISITS

From kindergarten through high school, teachers bring students to our libraries to check out books. Those visits need to be more than just a quick in-and-out… grab a book, check it out, return to classroom. What we need to do is help students develop a true appreciation for the value of reading.

Notice I said “appreciation for the value of reading,” not ‘a love of reading’. To love reading is a hobby, just like stamp collecting or building model planes, and we can no more teach a love of reading than we can a love of any other hobby. What we can do is expose students to a wide variety of books on many topics so some will come to love reading, and some who love crafts or sports or whatever will choose books on those topics so they can learn more, and that is the true goal: helping students see that reading brings them the information they need to be successful.

Most importantly, we must give students time to find a book they’ll want to read and then give them more time to begin reading it…to make sure it’s what they want. I begin each school year with a Library Orientation for English Language Arts classes focused entirely on reading. I give students plenty of time to find a book, and then we have silent sustained reading till the end of the period (we called it DEAR Time: Drop Everything And Read).

Allowing students plenty of time to choose a book and then giving them time to begin reading it allows them to become immersed in the story—they stick with it, they finish it faster, and they want to begin another book. My ELA teachers and I schedule library visits every other week for the entire school year, following the same procedure: short lesson→long book browse→longer silent reading. The biggest benefit to recurring free reading time was that our yearly State Reading Test scores moved steadily upward and remained above state averages for all school populations!

Interestingly, one year we followed a district directive for ELA classes to read 5-10 minutes daily at the start of their class period. Our library visits deteriorated because students became restless during long-term reading. The ELA teachers and I understood why, and when the new semester began, we went right back to DEAR time for the whole period. This convinced us how important it is to give students prolonged reading time.

3 PRACTICES TO PROMOTE READING

Here are the three practices I implemented that have had the most impact on sustained silent reading and reading achievement:

(1) During Book Browse our students use my “IT IS FOR ME” mnemonic checklist to find a book. The 6g ELA teachers require it as an exit ticket for each library visit. The 7g teachers use it at the start of the year, then intermittently after students begin to automatically use it. By 8th grade, returning students are proficient, so teachers focus on establishing the process with newly enrolled students, who quickly adopt it.

(2) During our silent sustained reading we have a quiet invited checkout procedure: I begin on one side of the library and invite students at 2 or 3 tables, depending on numbers, to check out. They line up single file at the circulation desk, continue to read as the line moves up, and after I check out their book they return to their seat. When each group is done, I quietly go over and invite 2 or 3 more tables for checkout. It’s an orderly process with only 8-10 students checking out at a time, and it takes maybe 10 minutes for an entire class, less than 20 minutes for a double class. (If students talk while in line, I send them back to their tables to check out after everyone else; they rarely do it again.)

(3) My 3rd year as School Librarian I decided to eliminate overdue fines. I wrote about this in another blog post: my reasoning is that fines discourage students from reading and collecting fines is time-consuming work for us with little benefit.

We can never, ever, refuse a child the opportunity to read!

BUILD READING LITERACY WITH READING STRATEGIES

While it’s important to promote independent reading, it’s even more important for School Librarians to employ reading comprehension strategies—predicting, making connections, questioning, annotating, inferring, organizing, and summarizing—during library lessons that involve reading.

ORGANIZING
I’ve written about my love for graphic organizers. They organize critical content and students learn to identify text structures by the type of graphic organizer used: classification, compare/contrast, order/sequence, cause/effect, and problem/solution.

For a set of these text structure organizers
and other organizers, take a look at
Cult of Pedagogy’s Graphic Organizer MultiPack.

SUMMARIZING
Summarizing is the most frequently missed type of question on standardized reading tests. It’s a strategy that students desperately need help with and we School Librarians can do that. I use the prior year’s student magazines and a guided worksheet for an introductory lesson on summarizing informational text. Join my email group to gain access to the worksheet and many other great products!

MAKING CONNECTIONS
Vocabulary is a common stumbling block for students when learning new content, especially some of our information literacy terminology. I often use graphic organizers to introduce new concepts, especially those that help them make connections between the new words and what they already know. Here are my two favorites:

These are just 3 types of reading strategies we can use to boost students’ comprehension of informational text. I’ve written previously about other ways to promote reading. If you haven’t read them yet, why not do it now and learn more about how you can help students develop Reading Literacy:

This is the first entry in my series of blog posts on the 5 Essential Literacies for Students. I invite readers to offer comments and suggestions about any or all of these literacies.

Updated 2025.

A “Love” for Reading & the School Librarian

Posted on August 15, 2016 by Barbara Paciotti

“Shouldn’t kids be able to enjoy reading?” is the question an elementary librarian asked on LM_NET, our librarians’ listserv. She was frustrated by trying to meet Common Core Standards at every library visit with her itty-bitties: “Does a five year old really need to understand problem and solution in a story? Are we asking too much of our littlest ones? Are we teaching them a love of reading, or that it can be a pain?”

One of the biggest challenges educators face is implementing ever-changing standards, trends, and directives from administration, community, and government. How can we discern which are sustainable, long-term, best practice and which are dust in the wind?

WHAT ‘MEETING STANDARDS’ MEANS

I believe it’s important to keep in mind that Standards, of any kind or source, don’t tell us how or how quickly we accomplish a goal, but rather that students are able to meet that Standard by the end of a school year. To reference a Standard in a lesson plan does not mean we expect all students to meet the standard during that particular lesson, but only that some part of the lesson is working towards meeting the standard.

Meeting a standard doesn’t mean a student will express it in the formal language of the standard. In fact, we should expect rather the opposite: we need a kid-friendly learning goal or target aimed at short-term concept attainment that will bring students closer to the long-term understanding.

We also need to use a variety of ‘gently covert’ strategies to extract understanding from students, especially little ones. LM_NET has been a great place to get ideas for expanding our repertoire. One librarian, responding to that post said this:

For in-school read-alouds….when educators choose exciting books and present them in engaging ways …[kids] can learn reading comprehension strategies in the process. When we present making meaning as detective work, students, even kindergarten children, enjoy the story. Your students might also benefit from simply sharing their personal responses to stories as think-pair-share activities. (Judi Moreillon)

Another suggested this:

If you have a collection of stories then you can introduce the concepts you are focusing on cumulatively with each one by saying something like, “Remember when we read…. Well, our story today…I want you to think about how that might make you feel. And how it might change the way the characters in the story think and feel and act.” … you’ve helped them all engage more with the story, increased their understanding of the sorts of techniques authors and illustrators use. (Barbara Braxton)

Based on the librarian’s post, it seemed to me that she was already charming students with delightful stories and that they were probably gaining a deeper understanding of standards than anyone could ‘test’ for, but I suggested this:

Use a felt board to have a few students retell the story, expand the story, or tell a new ending to the story.
Make “I have…who has” cards for a round-robin matching game to help students recall the plot of the story.
Make paper finger puppets of the main characters to take home and tell the story to their parents.

Any of the above strategies can address a standard yet make it enjoyable for the student. If we use a different tactic at each storytelling, the kids don’t see it as a task, but rather as a game. Once we’ve gone through all our tactics we start over; kids are delighted to revisit a familiar activity for a new story and this scaffolding gradually advances toward meeting the various standards by the end of the school year.

The librarian who posed the original query seemed happy with our responses, but shortly thereafter another LM_NET post appeared from a librarian with a similar ‘love for reading’ challenge: her middle school students weren’t finishing their books.

WHY STUDENTS AREN’T FINISHING BOOKS

As a middle school librarian, I observed students not finishing their books, and discerned the reason: quite simply, the students don’t like the books. Yes, friends, we can’t expect students to enjoy reading if they don’t enjoy the stories they’re trying to read. So, the question we need to ask is not why aren’t students finishing their books, but why don’t students like the books they choose?

The biggest problem I’ve seen is that students are rarely given enough time to find any book, let alone one that they will enjoy reading. We can help with that, as I did, by grouping our Fiction books by Subjects, the same way our Dewey books are grouped by Subjects. I originally put Subject labels on a good proportion of my fiction section, but that wasn’t enough. Students might search by subject in the online catalog or begin browsing the aisles for story topics they like, but when their time was up and they hadn’t been able to find what they wanted, they just grabbed anything. Now that I’ve created these smaller “collections” of like-topic books, students find their preferred type of story much more quickly, which the teachers also appreciate.

Another problem I see is that many middle school students still do not know how to choose a good book. I solved this problem when I modified another librarian’s clever mnemonic into the IT IS FOR ME! checklist and created a short video to explain how to use it. The video & checklist are now part of my 6g ELA Library Orientation lesson every year.

For every book checkout visit, I put stacks of the paper ‘app’—it looks like a smartphone—in baskets on my library tables and students turn one in to teachers at the end of the period for a daily grade. (I always have a daily grade item for a library visit & teachers appreciate that.) Students love it because they can find a good book so much more quickly. ELA teachers love it, too, because students are actually reading their books through.

You can download the IT IS FOR ME! app as a PDF from my Free Librarian Resources page. The video is freely available on both YouTube and Vimeo. Please feel free to use and share them however you wish.

ESTABLISH A READING CLIMATE WITH D.E.A.R. TIME

For many years our middle school has encouraged reading by having each grade’s ELA classes visit the library on a set day of the week, every other week throughout the school year, and the classes remain the entire period for DEAR time (Drop Everything And Read). If we truly value independent reading, then we have to not only allow students time to find a book, but we also need to give them time to become immersed in the story so they want to keep reading it. (Or if a student realizes the book is not quite what they want, the extra time gives them a chance to find a different one.)

When I have a library lesson, I limit it to about 10-15 minutes so students still have the rest of the period to look for a book and begin to read it. After students are quiet and reading I invite 1 or 2 tables at a time for checkout; it’s faster and less chaotic than letting kids check out as soon as they find a book. I encourage you to try this silent, invited checkout procedure and see what a difference it makes in your library visits and for finishing books.

Let me just say that once we established library DEAR time every other week, the percentage of students passing our State standardized Reading Test steadily increased. In 5 years we went from below 80% to above 90%. We were so successful that our district ELA department directed all middle schools to implement silent sustained reading for their students!

ACCEPT THAT NOT EVERYONE “LOVES” READING

School Librarians can help students meet Standards, and we can promote reading in and out of the classroom. However, we must accept the fact that not every student will love reading, and many will lose interest in reading literature. To “love reading” is a hobby, just like stamp collecting or building model planes. Keep in mind that many adults don’t read books for pleasure, yet they’re proficient readers who can read a book or newspaper or magazine or webpage when they need to find an answer or solve a problem. To succeed in life, our students need to be proficient readers, not voracious ones.

We also need to encourage and promote nonfiction reading among our students as well. New Standards are requiring—and tests are using—more nonfiction. As School Librarians, our challenge needs to be, not getting students to “love reading” but, teaching our students to effectively read in order to fulfill all 5 essential literacies.

Boost student reading literacy with my Essential Literacies units. Get them at No Sweat Library, my TeachersPayTeachers store.

Excite 6th grade students to read a variety of Fiction books with this 3-visit Unit focused on Reading Literacy. Lessons are short enough to allow time for students to browse & choose books, and for sustained, silent reading. | No Sweat Library

School Librarians will love using this unit that encourages 6th grade students to read informational books, print magazines, and use your own online subscription services. | No Sweat Library