Welcome+To+Reading+With+Meaning

**Welcome to Reading With Meaning ** Real Teaching Strategies for Real Classrooms Debbie Miller has, in recent years, become very much an authority on teaching reading comprehension and developing effective literacy programs. The former first grade teacher from Denver, Colorado now travels the country consulting with teachers, schools, and whole districts about effective primary literacy teaching and learning, while modeling her dynamic teaching style.

In 2002, while still in the classroom, Miller wrote her first book, //Reading with Meaning//. Classroom teachers who acquired the book in its first printing will likely go back and find their copies tagged with sticky notes and highlighted with comments jotted in the margins. As you read Miller’s work you will most likely tab, highlight, and mark it up. So please read a copy that you can keep. You will visit it often, we promise. Some people – many teachers included – believe there is a sort of mystique to teaching reading comprehension to young students, and to teaching it well. But Miller dispels that notion. In //Reading for Meaning// she demonstrates the process of teaching the comprehension strategies necessary for young children to develop into thoughtful, independent, and strategic readers.

She starts by developing a framework for teaching based on her own guiding principles of “gradually releasing responsibility to children as they gain expertise, teaching a few strategies of great consequence in depth over time, and giving children the gifts of time, choice, response, community and structure.” p.6

Then, as Ellin Oliver Keene states in the book's Forward, Miller “uses the natural seasons of a teaching year to reveal the gradual process of immersing children in a rigorous yet intimate learning environment…” p.ix. She starts with September and talks the readers through the building of classroom culture and climate and the establishment of the Readers’ Workshop. She shows teachers how to foster, encourage, and build on students’ literacy development throughout the year, ending the book with a short reflection in June. 

 