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They say choosing a catchy title is important when publishing almost any paper, essay or book.

Teri Lesesne certainly followed that advice when she chose the title for her latest book aimed at helping educators (and home-schooling parents) "connect kids with books that will interest them the most."

Naked Reading: Uncovering What Tweens Need to Become Lifelong Readers is a 'skinny book' (more on that later..!) that examines the often missing motivation and increasingly more common reluctance of young students to read because they want to read. Lesesne explores how educators can work to increase the fun and motivation and decrease the reluctance of these youngsters to read.


An associate professor teaching graduate and undergraduate classes in young adult and children's literature, Lesesne has a resume that features fifteen years of front-line experience teaching English in middle-school classrooms. She brings to Naked Reading not only the skills of an experienced educator but also a personal passion for reading and a desire to infect young people with that same love of reading.

I suppose I should explain the title. The author had observed that it often took her youngest granddaughter a long time to dry off after her evening shower, don her pjs, and rejoin the family. It finally was discovered that, rather than toweling off after her shower, she would ". . .dive into the walk-in closet in her room, sit down on her little stepstool, and continue to read." She had read somewhere that allowing one's body to 'air-dry' was healthier than towel drying. She was simply taking advantage of that longer 'drying time' to feed her passion for reading.

The family's phrase 'naked reading' came to signify that passion to steal minutes from whatever activity, precious minutes to lose oneself within a book.

It would be useful to also note the author's definition of 'tween' includes younger teens that might not match the general definition of 10, 11, and 12 y/o tweens. She categorizes her tweens as students in grades 4 through 8, including ages nine through fourteen.


Naked Reading quickly and neatly debunks the current "myths about reading" as applied to tween readers. In their place is laid out a plan to measure, motivate, and 'make fun again' the lost art of reading by young people.


Lesesne makes the point that certain types of reading are valuable to any reader and particularly the young reader:

... unconscious delight, becoming " . . .lost in the journeys of the characters...";

... reading autobiographically, "We want to see someone like us";

... vicarious experience, "(imagining) what it might be like to travel to exotic worlds and have splendid adventures without parents and pesky peers and limitations." and;

... aesthetic experience, to "read for the sheer pleasure beauty and pleasure that reading can bring."


Much of Naked Reading deals with understanding what kinds of books teens want to read, why they might choose a particular book, and how an educator can monitor a student's growth in reading skills and enjoyment without resorting to stifling quizzes, exams, and the dreaded 'book report'.

Comic books, magazines, series books, non-fiction, humor, mystery, and many horror, suspense and supernatural books will all appeal to the tween reader. It turns out (actually, it is learned by surveys of tweens themselves) that hearing stories read aloud, having some input into their reading choices, and the simple opportunity to own the books they read are all important factors (among many others) in motivating tweens to read.


After the reading, the worm turns. As educators are wont to do, they need some measure of the student's involvement in the story and what they brought from reading it. If only to fill up all the little boxes on the students' grade scoresheets. It should not be a surprise that low on the list of students' favorite measuring methods is anything involving writing.

Instead, Lesesne offers many alternatives to the dry 'book report': acrostics, 'things we read from A to Z', annotations, chalk outline, genre exchange, reading logs, novel ties, sticky-note poetry, and on and on.

More important than describing any of these is the idea is that all these ideas are anything but a dry 'book report.' They all involve writing, focused thinking, and analytical skills and thus serve to meet the needs of an educational process.


The Bottom Line
There are literally hundreds of books cited in Naked Reading: Uncovering What Tweens Need to Become Lifelong Readers that guide readers to selections that will draw young readers into the world of pleasure reading. A rich bibliography of professional works and children's literature as well as lists scattered throughout the book all serve as excellent guides to your efforts to begin making your own tweens pleasure readers.
 
 

Recommended: Yes