Naked Reading: Uncovering What Tweens Need to Become Lifelong Readers by Teri Lesesne

This book discusses techniques for engaging young people in literature.  Lesesne provides lists of books that are likely to be engaging to kids in their tweens.  Lesesne also discusses a number of classroom techniques that can be used to engage students, such as keeping a library in the classroom, creating book ladders, and assignments that can be used as alternatives to book reports.  Lesense also emphasizes the importance of reading aloud beyond the elementary level.  Lesense gives us examples of situations she has experienced with students and her own family to illustrate her ideas.

Analysis:  I think that this book is an essential read for anyone intending to become a teacher of English.  Although it focuses on tweens, the techniques described in this book would be helpful for teachers of all levels.  I especially like the idea of the book ladder.  Once you grab their attention with one great book, you need to keep it for as long as possible: what better way than to give the other related books?  The book ladder is a way to optimize the benefit of that one special moment when a kid says, "Wow.  This is a great book."

Reading Aloud:
I agree with Lesesne that reading aloud is a great way to engage students.  My mother used to read aloud to me from "The Lord of the Rings" and I still consider that experience one of the main reasons I have become a lifelong reader.  The importance of reading aloud for poetry is obvious:  poetry written down on a page often loses the value it has when spoken.  Books that have interesting language, such as M.T. Anderson's Feed, can benefit from being read aloud.  A Clockwork Orange by Stanley Kubrick would benefit from this as well, although it would have to be used in a high level course