How Do I Get Students to Read and Write?

I've been looking for a way to motivate my students to read and write. If found this bit of advice on the website Teachnet.com:

Model Reading and Writing for your Students:

Reality means that students' reading and writing abilities are sliding. We can point the finger at outside influences like television, but there are things we can all do to bolster these skills in small, subtle ways. Things like writing messages to the students on the board at the beginning of the day, encouraging students to write you notes that you could respond to, modeling good reading by reading aloud to your class and sharing why you like the book, or becoming pen pals with another class over the internet. Our custodian even left a positive message for our class one day! These are but a few of the examples of how you can coax your students into using their reading and writing skills.

At a set time each day or each week, all available staff members at some schools, including secretaries, custodians, principals and kitchen aides, share reading time either reading to small groups of students, or with students reading to them.

Often I set time at the end of class to have my students read. I have many books in my classroom bookcase, as well as magazines and newspapers (but not nearly enough.) I also have had them go to the library to check out books. I always model by reading something myself.

At the end of the reading period, I model good reading techniques. First, I tell them how I used prior knowledge to predict what I am reading. Usually I do this by just talking about the title of the story that I read. Then I tell them about the questions that I had while reading. Lastly, I tell them the answers that I discovered by reading. In other words I do the KWL method: what I know, what I want to know, and what I learned.

However, I don't end it there. I first distribute blank index cards to them. I then ask them to answer the KWL questions about what they read. Before I pick up their cards, I ask a couple of students to share their answers with the class.

As far as writing is concerned, I always have the students write in their journals for the first five minutes of class. Then I have a few students share what they wrote with the class.

Link to Teachnet article.