Parent Tips: Lesson 3.4
In Lesson 3.4, kids will either be excited or horrified to learn that it wasn’t enough to master reading chapter books. After all, your child has heard how important it is to learn to read for most of their life and is probably pretty pleased with themselves for having done the Big Thing all the adults were a little bit nuts about. And they should be! Mastering Level 1: Elementary Reading is not a given, and June Writers has been relieved to see a growing national movement to make the curriculum+ changes necessary to ensure that all kids learn to read in school.
But to access higher-level schooling and learning, your kids will also need to master the remaining three levels of reading: Level 2: Inspectional Reading, Level 3: Analytical Reading, and Level 4: Comparative Reading. In Lesson 3.4, we introduce the concept of higher-level reading and teach your child how to do Level 2: Inspectional Reading and the beginning parts of Level 3: Analytical Reading.
Level 2: Inspectional Reading
Inspectional Reading is a relatively easy skill to pick up but often overlooked in the process of teaching kids close reading at school. If your child doesn’t feel comfortable picking up a stack of texts or books and sorting through them to figure out what they are and if they’re useful for their purposes, then they need to learn Inspectional Reading. The end goal is to be able to pick up any text and say what it is, with reasonable confidence.
Level 3: Analytical Reading
Most of us are already familiar with the critical importance of developing Analytical Reading. This third reading level is the basis of most higher-level education and thought work in the real world, and the baseline of a life of continuous learning and participation in a functioning democracy. The final boss here is to develop your own informed opinion about whether the argument of a text is successful and important. Of course, this is no small feat. So, June Writers divides the skills of Analytical Reading across this lesson and the rest of our Level 3: Texts Under Scrutiny program. This level of June Writers is as much about developing critical reading skills as learning to write nuanced arguments. You can’t have one without the other. And you can’t assume that kids—even very bright kids—will pick up higher-level reading skills without explicit instruction. It’s easy to be sloppy and miss things.
Want to learn more? We highly recommend How to Read a Book: The Classical Guide to Intelligent Reading by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren. Adler and Van Doren’s book is undoubtedly a relic of a bygone era, but it’s a darn good relic full of enduring wisdom. Also, there is also something particularly enjoyable about reading a book about reading books; be prepared to receive a lot of puzzled looks.
