Independent Reading Meets the 21st Century

Last year, I read The Book Whisperer by Donalyn Miller.

This book reaffirmed my belief in the importance of independent reading.  It also empowered me to take a long look at the independent reading I was requesting of my 6th graders.  Mrs. Miller is also a 6th grade teacher who inspired her students to embrace academic rigor in their personal readings.  Her students were being required to read 50+ books during the school year.  Mine were being asked to read one a month.

I then read Kelly Gallagher's Reading Reasons (Stenhouse 2003) and saw this astounding statistic:

Students in the top five percent of the national reading scores read 144 times more than students in the bottom five percent.  The average time spent reading for all grades is 7.1 minutes a day in public schools and around the  nation.  There is a strong correlation between time spent reading and higher test scores. In a study of fifth graders by Anders, Wilson and Fielding, the following correlation was found:

Percentile rank	# of minutes reading text per day	Estimated number of words read per year
98	90.7	4,733,000
90	40.4	2,357,000
70	21.7	1,168,000
50	12.9	601,000
20	3.1	134,000
10	1.6	51,100

I began thinking....how can I as a reading teacher, compete against computers? Social networking? The internet? Computer games? And the list goes on...