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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]My 7th grader does not read for fun - he is dyslexic, but won’t even read audiobooks for fun unless there is literally nothing else to do - can’t swim, play ball, draw, or use a screen. He has found he falls asleep better if he reads before bed, so he often does, but only for 15 minutes or so.

He reads dystopia for fun - reading Gone now, loves Hunger Games and Divergent. He really liked Unbroken and The Hate U Give. He generally dislikes books suggested by librarians and teachers - not enough action and violence, too much text describing how people feel about each other. Whether teachers aren’t aware of new/popular YA lit and so don’t recommend it, or feel like kids must get their fill of it and so suggest something else I don’t know, but we have a really hard time finding books my son might actually want to read.

I’d suggest keeping your list very wide - The Hate U Give might qualify for your list, no? - and reminding kids that audiobooks are books, and that they might like them better than eye reading. [/quote]

That’s the thing, I have no “list.” It will be whatever the kids want. What I will do is provide suggestions if they are like “I don’t know any books about a social issue”  but I have no list they must choose from. I keep up with/read/purchase a lot of current YA and have those in my classroom library as options they can choose from. Some kids like YA and some don’t- the ones who don’t often see it as too juvenile. [/quote]

As long as you have suggestions I think it is fine - what we have struggled with is my son being given choice (whatever he wants to read in a genre/theme etc.) but he has no idea what he’ll like, takes the first thing he sees/is suggested because he thinks he’ll hate it no matter what, so why care, and then, big surprise, he hates it. If you have some way to help reluctant readers find books they like I think that would be a great help toward reading for fun. Offering choice is great, but for reluctant readers it isn’t enough to get them to read, in my experience. Maybe my kid is just extra resistant, though![/quote]

He might be extra resistant but that’s not atypical. When they don’t read for choice they literally don’t know how to choose a book. Obviously that’s a skill we will work on and I have ways of showing them how they can gauge a book’s value to them, figure out what they like, etc. Suggestions help and for some kids they just need to know which books could fit this particular genre, but giving them the freedom to figure that out and make a choice is part of hopefully giving them the tools to be lifelong readers. [/quote]

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