Reading with Meaning: Teaching Comprehension in the Primary Grades

There are certain "must have" books for teachers. This is one of them. Miller takes a decade of reading research (as synthesized by Pearson, et. al., 1992), and puts it into practice in her classroom. We move through the year with her, watching as she scaffolds for us and her students explicit reading instruction that truly works. In Chapter 1, Miller goes straight to the crux of the matter: Gradually release responsibility to students; teach a few strategies of great consequence in depth over time; give students the gifts of time, choice, response, community, and structure. Chapter 2 tells us how-and why-we should create a sense of community in the classroom. "Real classroom communities," writes Miller, "are more than just a look. Real communities flourish when we bring together the voices, hearts, and souls of the people who inhabit them." We must be "deliberate" in September if we are to create the type of environment in which growth and authentic learning will occur. The Reader's Workshop is the topic of Chapter 3. Wait a minute, you may be saying, how does one have a "Reader's Workshop" when most of the students are not yet reading? "Readers' workshop in September," Miller writes, "is less about teaching children how to read and more about modeling and teaching children what it is that good readers do, setting the tone for the workshop and establishing its expectations and procedures, and engaging and motivating children to want to learn to read." And so Miller shows us, in detail, how we can go about this foundation-building. She begins with "Book Selection," then "Reading Aloud, Mini-Lessons, Reading and Conferring," and finally "Sharing." With our solid underpinning in place we are now ready to settle in---the topic of Chapter 3. Here we learn how and why to give children choices when selecting books. Miller also discusses briefly phonics and word identification---two things that she believes should be taught side-by-side with comprehension strategies. In the next two chapters Miller delves in depth into the comprehension strategies of schema and visualizing. She then devotes a chapter to "Digging Deeper." It is now January, she notes, and "[t]he time is right for increasing the sophistication of the read-alouds, showing them how to engage in more challenging dialogue and making connections from our past experiences to more in-depth learning." Timing, as they say, is everything. It is this type of knowledge and the ability to exploit the foundation that has been so carefully laid that makes Miller a teacher extraordinaire. Chapter 8 through 10 are devoted to the remaining reading strategies of inferring, questioning, determining importance, and synthesizing. Miller includes numerous anecdotes, vignettes, lesson models, tips, techniques, and more. A list of references and a detailed index are included. Practical and brilliant, this is one book that is definitely required reading for primary grade teachers. Reviewed by the Education Oasis s

I had bought this book after it was highlighted at a conference I attended. Shortly after, it was one of the book choices for a literature circle I was participating in during a grad class. Now nearly all the teachers in my district have read it or are familiar with it. My reading intervention teacher teaches her lessons directly from the examples in the books. It proves that you really can do a lot with comprehension in the younger grades and you can teach them to use adult language (teacher terms) to convey their thoughts. A workshop I attended yesterday focused primarly on how the teacher incorporates all the aspects of comprehension as listed by Debbie Miller in her 1 and 2nd grade looping classroom. It is an EASY/Fun professional read that gives you precise examples of lessons, activities and student responses. There is also a video series that goes along with it which has the folks from Strategies that Work leading the conversations. A MUST HAVE in any primary classroom to teach comprehension and reading effectively.

If you have dedicated yourself to producing thoughtful readers who read for meaning, this is the book you need! Not only is it filled with helpful lesson ideas, but the arrangement of each chapter follows a scaffolded approach to help young readers engage and develop as lifelong readers. Miller shows teachers how to lay out the entire year. Included in this book are chapters about schema building, mental images, inferring, questioning, non-fiction reading, and synthesizing. She focuses on one comprehension strategy in each chapter, including how to introduce it to students AND what children's books she considers "tried-and-true." At the end of each chapter, the author includes a list of children's book titles that all highlight the comprehension strategy perfectly for young children. I have purchased many of the titles that she recommends. All of the books are outstanding pieces of literature that children adore. Also, the lessons work well in a Reader's Workshop format. After instruction, students can get busy practicing reading from their own books by using what they learned right away. This book is an outstanding resource for any teacher!

In this book, Debbie Miller takes you inside the walls of her first grade classroom, leading you through the course of the school year where her students become independent and motivated readers. You can hear the excited buzz of the students as they discover meaning in their reading and thoughtfully discuss their findings with their peers. Her students are intrinsically motivated to learn from their reading as they simultaneously decode the text. I highly recommend this book to any primary teacher looking for new strategies and techniques for teaching and modeling comprehension in their classroom. Debbie Miller gives fun and practical ideas that can be applied in most any grade. She supplies the reader with endless strategies for creating a collaborative and safe learning environment. Every page is packed full of inspiring stories and examples that will transform your teaching and questioning strategies. Don't let this book pass you by!

Debbie Miller is a magical teacher whom I have had the pleasure of observing. She has captured the details of what makes her such a great teacher in her book Reading with Meaning. It is the first resource I have found that truly helps me to visualize how I can teach all of the reading comprehension strategies in my first grade classroom. It also backs many of my current beliefs with Debbie's resources and well thought out rationales. I would highly recommend this book for any teacher who is ready for their primary kiddos to start interacting with and understanding what they are reading.