Just 15 Minutes a Day

I found this neat fact in some of the readings for a class I'm taking and thought I'd share.

"A 'good' reader who averages 15 minutes a day reads approximately one million words a year. Out of this vast number of words, a few hundred to thousands will stay in the reader's vocabulary--at least as words the reader is familiar with" (Nagy & Anderson, 1984).

To put this in context, they were discussing adolescents and adults, not younger children. Their point was that with more than half of all secondary students reporting reading very little, it's even more necessary to help students learn the vocabulary they need to understand their content area reading.

I'm going to share that with my reading students next year, maybe as some sort of trivia question / warm-up.