Indiana Middle Grades Teachers

Are Reading Role Models

by

Jack Humphrey

Middle Grades Reading Network

  

         

     In a community of readers, the adults in the lives of young adolescents serve as role models and provide guidance to ensure that reading is a priority.  Schools provide support to families to help them encourage their children to read books, magazines, and newspapers.  Reading teachers and school library media specialists enjoy reading and promote reading by faculty members who pass on their interest and pleasure in reading to students.

     Many schools have a library of books for teachers located in the school library or faculty lounge.  As teachers read books, they tell other staff members about the books and donate copies for others to read.

     Teachers Under Cover groups are active in many Indiana middle grades schools.  Groups meet during the school year as well as in the summer.  Books are obtained from bookstores or public libraries.  Discussion questions are made up by members or found on the internet at addresses such as http://www.readinggroupguides.com/.    

     There are 11 Indiana Barnes and Noble stores which all work closely with Teacher Under Cover book groups.  The stores are located in Avon, Bloomington, Carmel, Evansville, Fort Wayne, Indianapolis, Lafayette, Merrillville, Mishawaka, Noblesville, and Valparaiso.  See  /contact.htm  for a list of contact persons at the stores.

     Call the contact person and arrange to visit the store.  Find out where your group can hold its meetings in the store, how to get Educator’s Discount Cards, and where books of interest to the group are located, and so forth.  Then arrange for your group to meet at the store and make plans for future meetings. 

     Recent books read and discussed in Teachers Under Cover groups include 1776 by David McCullough, A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson, The Broker by John Grisham, The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson, The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard, The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseni, The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger, True Believer by Nicholas Sparks, and The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman. 

 

"The wonderful thing about books is that they allow us to enter imaginatively into someone else’s life.  And when we do that, we learn to sympathize with other people.  But the real surprise is that we also learn truths about ourselves, about our own lives, that somehow we hadn’t been able to see before."  Katherine Paterson