Read 4000

Read 4000

Read 4000 is an attempt to capture the simple idea that in order to grow in reading achievement, starting at 4^th grade, children need to read about 800,000 words per year. That’s just to keep up with the 50^th %ile of reading achievement. Students in the top 10% of reading achievement are reading on average 2.3 million words per year. For a point of reference the complete series of 7 Harry Potter books contains about 1 million words.

A Simple Number

Trying to communicate reading volume in terms of words per year doesn’t go well. Most people have resorted to setting goals based on a number of books per year. The Southern Regional Education Board, Making Middle Grades Work, and High Schools that Work recommend setting a goal of 25 books per year. Donalyn Miller, author of The Book Whisperer and Reading in the Wild, recommends 40 books per year. In all cases they recommend finding a way to allow/account for longer books, short books, and articles. The formal research is based on words per year. I think the simplest way to balance it all out and communicate simply is to go after pages per year. 4000 pages per year will get us where we need to be. In middle school (actually from 4^th grade on up) paper back books tend to have about 200 words per page. In high school and books published for adults there are usually about 300 words per page. 

Read 4000 pages each year

In middle school “Read 4000” means read 40 books a year, or read one book a week (but don’t stop in the summer).

200 wpp x 100 pages = 20,000 words in a 4^th grade book

20,000 words per book x 40 books = 800,000 words in a year

In high school “Read 4000” means read 25 books a year, or read one book every two weeks (including summers).

300 wpp x 100 pages = 30,000 words in a 9^th grade book

30,000 words per book x 25 books = 750,000 words in a year

85/15: a balance of success

Reading volume is essential for reading growth. Another essential component is reading success. Students will not read at this volume and their practice will not be helpful if they don’t have access to books they can read successfully on their own. The vast majority of the total reading that students do should be successful independent practice. That means that most of the time students should be reading books they can read and want to read all by themselves.

What about on-grade level reading? What about success on standardized tests that now have higher expectations for reading level? All students should have instruction with complex texts that are on-or-above grade level. This should not take up more than about 15% of the student’s total reading time. When students are working with complex texts, at a level above their independent reading level, they need time and supports to make that literacy work useful. Excellent teachers have always done this. They provide pre-teaching, focus points, peer-support, post-reading activities, text-dependent questions, and graphic organizers as support for reading complex texts. They provide cues and supports for rereading and developing comprehension through close attention and careful construction of complex ideas. This is good and useful work. But it takes a toll on independent reading. Teachers have to balance the scaffolded, supported reading of complex texts with extensive engaged independent reading. The balance we recommend in terms of pages and minutes is 85% independent reading 15% supported reading. 85% of all the reading students do should be in texts that students can read and want to read all by themselves. 

Traditional Curriculum

In the traditional high school ELA curriculum, students are assigned one major work per quarter. That is four books per year. That averages out at 600 pages per year. It may not be surprising that 600 pages is 15% of 4000 pages. It may be that the traditional high school curriculum has been successful for students that are already independent readers. These students read on their own. They read outside of school and they probably read 20 or more books a year beyond what is in the high school curriculum.

1 hour every day of engaged independent reading

If students engage in one hour a day of engaged independent reading (books they can read and want to read all by themselves) we have strong reasons to believe they will grow in reading achievement more that one grade level equivalent for each year of schooling. Students who read one hour a day, five days a week, grow more than a year’s worth in reading achievement in a year of school.

What are we doing in school to address this?

Scheduling and protecting time during the school day for independent reading.

•  Sometimes as much as 30 minutes every day

Filling classrooms with beautiful and engaging books

•  Wide-reading libraries (books that kids love)

•  Theme libraries (collections of books related to curriculum topics)

Promoting and tracking self-selected independent reading

•  Reading logs and next-read lists

Valuing independent reading in class-work and discussion

•  Students write and discuss reader response journals

•  Teachers model, assess, and provide targeted instruction for writing in response to reading

Emphasizing Inquiry Learning

•  Students raise their own questions about core concepts

•  Students read independently to find answers and contribute to each others learning

•  Students write something for other people who might be trying answer the same questions

What can parents do at home to support this?

•  Encourage 30 minutes of engaged independent reading at home every night (if we do 30 minutes at school, can you do 30 minutes at home?).

•  Talk about books and reading with your child

•  Ask what other kids are reading

•  Ask kids what is on their next-read lists

•  Encourage series reading (reading all the books in a series by an author)

•  Help students get access to more of the books they love and want to read. Library visits, book fairs, book stores

•  Talk to teachers about what kids love to read

•  Ask how many books or pages they’ve read this year. Are they on track to Read 4000?

• Celebrate when they finish a book or reach a mile-stone (Try not to make this a straightforward rewards system. If you love what you are reading, reading is its own reward).

Most of the ideas in this entry are based on the work of Richard Allington:

http://www.teachersread.net/papers-and-articles

and this specific research article published in 1988:

Growth in Reading and How Children Spend Their Time Outside of School Author(s): Richard C. Anderson, Paul T. Wilson, Linda G. Fielding
Source: Reading Research Quarterly, Vol. 23, No. 3 (Summer, 1988), pp. 285-303 Published by: International Reading Association

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/748043

or

http://www.palmbeachschools.org/imlms/documents/growthinread.pdf