Welcome to ELA I, ELA I H, and Reading Flex!  Our reading classroom is a community in which students demonstrate ownership of their learning.  They are active contributors in the acquisition of new knowledge, rather than passive recipients.  Students learn to see themselves as individuals who have ideas to share and who can also assist their classmates in learning.  Meaning in literature comes from the interaction between the reader and the text (author), so each student’s response to literature is valuable.  By sharing these responses through discussion and collaborative work, students develop self-esteem and a sense of belonging, and ultimately, a love of literature as well.  They learn to enjoy reading, have confidence in their reading, share their reading with others, choose to read on their own, and monitor their own reading progress.  This ownership of literacy generates not only lifelong readers, but lifelong learners as well.