A click through Wes’s post on his son’s improvement in and excitement for reading (congratulations, Alexander!) took me back to Stephen Krashen’s website, where I rediscovered his "88 Generalizations about Free Voluntary Reading", a handy one pager of research findings on how and why we should be using SSR (that’s sustained silent reading) in school. 
    Starting this year, we begin almost every morning with SSR, followed by a building wide writing prompt — and sometimes I need to remind staff why that’s important.  It never ceases to amaze me just how hard teachers have to fight for time to simply read and write, but we do.  This’ll help.   Thanks, Dr. Krashen.
    PS — For those of you who’d like to hear more about SSR and why it’s a good thing, you might want to give a listen to this podcast, recorded by Wes, of Dr. Krashen from a while back. #