Teaching Reading through Literature

Do you want your child or student to love reading? Do you want him to be an excellent writer? I know I do. When I started teaching, my principal gave me and a fellow teacher the opportunity to create our own literature units. She even bought us classroom sets of the books we chose. It was a wonderful blessing. 

Using literature is the best way to teach children how to read. I believe so much in this method of teaching reading and writing that I continued it with my own children while home schooling. The beautiful imagery, the use of figurative language, the sentence structure, and the rich vocabulary help students fall in love with the stories and help them begin to emulate the author’s writing style. If you’d like to teach in this way, remember a few steps. 

1. Use well written literature of various kinds to teach skills that are used in the book. Read the book and take notice of any figurative language, imagery, vocabulary, and any other reading skills. 
2. Teach those skills to your students and have them find examples in the book.
3. Have the student mimic the writing style by changing the story slightly or by writing a prequel or sequel. 

To take it a step further, use rich literature to teach a thematic unit. If you prefer to use literature units that are already created, click the button to see the products at my store Got to be LIT.