Expectations for Reading

Find books, authors, subjects, and themes that matter to you, to your life, to who you are and who you want to become.
Try new authors, subjects, purposes, and genres; expand your reading schemas.
Recognize that there are different modes of reading and different stances readers take in regard to different kinds of texts.
Develop and articulate your criteria for selecting and abandoning books.
Go inside your books and respond to the writing you are treading; decide what is working and needs more work in the books you read.
Read as much as you can, as joyfully as you can.
Read for at least 30 minutes every night, seven nights a week.
Maintain a chronological record of the books you finish reading or abandon.
Create a handbook of reading and writing minilessons, recorded chronologically, with a table of contents.
Take care of the books I have provided for you. Return each book you borrow to the classroom library.
Establish and work toward significant, relevant goals for yourself as a reader each quarter.
Take a deliberate stance toward reading and responding with your whole heart and mind.
Work as hard in reading workshop as I do. Live other lives and learn about your own, see how other writers have written, acquire their knowledge, escape, imagine, think, connect, contrast, travel, ponder, laugh, cry, love, and grow up.