Free The Book Whisperer by Donalyn Miller, Jeff Anderson

time and imagine with them the wonderful books we will find there. I post library days on our class Web site. I want students to pick up on the fact that I think library days are events to anticipate. On the big day, I always ask a student to remind me when it is a few minutes before our assigned library time, so that we can line up and get there promptly.
    When we line up to go to the library, every student must have a book to return, renew, or read, or a plan to get one at the library. Because the main source of books for my students is our own classroom library, students may bring these books if they do not want to check out an additional book from the school library. If students do not carry a book, then they will spend their time in the library looking for one. The goal is that everyone walks out of the library with a book to read. My students tease me, crying, “Not fair!” when they realize that by teaching two classes, I get double trips to the library on a single day.
    When we get to the library, all students are purposeful. If they are checking out books, they immediately begin looking. Students who are not checking out books head to quiet corners and read. No one visits, no one clusters, and no one talks. OK, not exactly true .... A devoted tribe of followers accompanies me and chats while we roam the stacks, hunting and gathering books. I spend the entire visit helping students locate books, but I cannot contain my own excitement when I discover treasures I would like to read, too. My students are jealous of the teacher perks of library use—no fines, no due dates, and unlimited checkouts—all privileges I exploit fully.
    Because I work with my students to find books and eliminate off-task library behavior, our librarian is free to check out books and assist students who need help with searching the library’s online catalogue. When everyone has a book to read, we all sit and read until our library time ends or we leave the library and go back to class to read.
How Much Time Is It, Really?
    Counting all the snippets of time I manage to gather in a typical school week, how much reading time do I really capture for my students? Replacing warm-ups with reading time and stealing as many stray moments as possible, I calculate, gains twenty to thirty minutes of reading per day. The Commission on Reading’s touchstone report Becoming a Nation of Readers recommends that students engage in two hours of silent sustained reading per week (Anderson, Hiebert, Scott, and Wilkinson, 1985). Without giving up any instructional time, you could easily find two hours a week for your students. If you are willing to set aside a chunk of class time for independent reading as well, your students could be reading as much as four hours a week in school .
    My students are now time stealers themselves, using otherwise wasted time in their daily routine to read. Paul reads at the bus stop in the mornings, and Daniel reads while waiting for his mom to pick him up from school. Alex reads at lunchtime, and Madison reads at recess while she sits under a tree. Once students catch the reading bug, they will go to great lengths to find time to read.
    While I was greeting students in the hall one morning, Molly breathlessly ran up to me to share the creative way she was able to continue reading her latest mystery book, The Ghost’s Grave , by Peg Kehret. “Mrs. Miller, you have had such an influence on me. Last night I read in the shower!”
    Amused, I asked, “How were you able to read in the shower and keep the book dry?”
    Other students gathered around us, not to look at the reading freak but to listen to Molly’s advice so they could do it, too. “I was at the end of my book, and my mom was yelling for me to get in the shower. So I hung my arm out of the shower as far as possible so I could keep reading it.”
    Another student suggested, “Hey, I wonder if you could slide a Ziploc bag over