Reading Speed

I feel like I have about 2348972938472938423 things to learn before I should be allowed in the classroom. However, I'm glad that I don't have to learn that many because then I wouldn't be allowed to teach for at least another 50 years. When I'm in a class of any kind now I notice all kinds of weird things that normal people wouldn't notice. I've always been super observant about tons of things, but I feel like once I put my heart toward education that my brain just takes over and finds things to think about. Today's interesting observation has to do with reading speed. In Methods, we were reading a set of articles/documents and I finished them all in the allotted time. three other students finished close behind me and everyone else was still reading. This made me think of several questions regarding what to do in the classroom when you make kids read.

How do you decide how much time students get to 'read' the material? Too much time, and kids who are finished are bored...too little time and many kids don't get the information you're trying to pass along. When groups of kids begin to finish, they can tend to become bored which leads to behavior that is 'bad' in many cases. How can we create activities to keep the 'finished' kids busy?

Finishing reading things before is not a new phenomenon in my life...in fact I got my lamp taken away from me in elementary school because I would not go to bed due to reading. By 6th grade, my reading level was off the chart, literally, as I was labeled as a 12th+ . Reading does not come easy to all, and some people just read more slowly, and need to, and that is perfectly fine. But, it makes in-class reading a difficult thing to balance.

I have no idea what the answer is to this - which is normal since I rarely know the answers to things that I want to know the answer to. Just something to think about.