No doubt you’ve heard this: ‘Third grade is the year when students go from ‘learning to read’ to ‘reading to learn.’ The truth is not so clear-cut, as explained here by Joanne Yatvin, a past president of the National Council of Teachers of English who now supervises student teachers for Portland State University. She also writes books for teachers.
By Joanne Yatvin
A recent New York Times article described summer remedial reading programs for third graders who were in danger of being held back because they had not met the cut-off scores on school reading tests. As I read it I couldn’t help thinking that the states involved could have saved a lot of money and helped children more if they had arranged to have them spend their summer vacations in a public library. There, at least, librarians would have led them to books that appealed to their interests and included them in groups where a trained adult was reading stories aloud.