Hopefully, students already love to read a variety of books. If not, they will certainly find something they like in our enormous classroom library, in the school's online collections of books, or by browsing articles on the internet. We read silently for at least 20 minutes every day.
In addition, I read at least one book (or selection) to the class every day. These books are usually high-interest nonfiction. We talk frequently about the text as I read it; encourage students to ask and answer questions and voice their opinions. We call these our Interactive Read-Alouds.
Students usually write a paragraph about a text after the Interactive Read-Aloud in order to practice skills. These skills include summarizing, inferring character traits, inferring themes, identifying main idea, and so on. Since we typically talk about these things as we read, students are generally well-prepared for the writing. Our reading assessments are almost always in the same format.