How much should kids read?

It was PLT day at my school.  

Do you have a Professional Learning Community?  (We call ours a Professional Learning Team.)

We've had PLT for a few years now.  Luckily this year our PLT is facilitated by a TLC, like Antoinette.

This week we were discussing how we judge that a student has read an adequate amount?

In Richard Allington's words, volume of reading.

In other words

How much should kids read each day?

Upon my initial Google search most research talks about time in minutes.

I don't like calculating reading amount that way, since some readers struggle to read, they inherently will read less volume in the minutes than a proficient reader.  How will they close the gap that way?

And as Allington points out, struggling readers should be reading more than proficient readers.

So we got to thinking and researching.

In toddlers and preschool students, you judge their future success by the amount of words they know or are exposed to.  Shouldn't the same be true of reading?

It's not the number of minutes, but the number of words!

Luckily Scholastic.com had compiled some research our team is going to discuss next week.

Read Everyday

The quote I found most valuable:

If a child reads as much as one million words per year, they will be in top 2% of all children

on standardized reading tests. If a child reads as little as 8000 words per year, they will

be in bottom 2% of all children on standardized reading tests. Therefore, if you read 3,000

words every day you will be in the top 2%. If you read 20 words every day, you will be in

the bottom 2%.

How much do you think students should be reading each day?  How do you track reading per day?

EmilyK