Happy World Book Day!
We all know how important it is that students read for pleasure, but what if they struggle to find books they enjoy?
Superhero Librarian Nancy Pearl has a solution: reading doorways. She believes that there are four reasons people fall in love with books:
- Story
- Character
- Setting
- Language
Every book contains all four, but in different proportions and flavours. Every reader also has one of these as their preferred doorway into reading.
So, instead of choosing a new book with similar topics or themes to the one you just enjoyed, it might be more helpful to ask why you loved that book.
We’ve created a worksheet designed to get your students to ask that same question for themselves.
First, they answer the questions on side one, then they flip the sheet over for tips on how to interpret their answers. If you like, you could print side one only and then project side two at the front of the class.
Why not take a poll at the end of the activity and see which doorways are the most popular in the class? We’d love to see the results!
