Terry Learns to Read

Here's a story of a little girl I watched learn to read in the other half of the semi-detached house we purchased when we were just starting a family.

The summer before kindergarten, Terry learned to read from her Aunt Becky, who had just completed grade one and showed her regard for school by stealing every reader she had used. Becky's method was simple. Beginning with the easiest book, Becky read aloud each sentence, touching under each word as she read it aloud. Then she told Terry to point to each word as she read the sentence. If Terry made a miscue, Becky lightly slapped Terry's hand. "No," Becky would say and read the sentence again. I often eavesdropped on the daily lessons as Becky led Terry though the books from easiest to harder and harder.

Terriy read so well by September of her kindergarten year, the school recommended that Teryy skip to grade one. (If the school had really supported this acceleration, they would have recommended Terry attend kindergarten even though she could read. The school should have realized that the grade-eleven school-drop-out parents--Terry was on the way--hated school and would probably do the opposite of any request.)

I videotaped Terry early in K at a faculty of education facility and her word recognition skills were at the sixth grade level. She could pronounce a lot of words correctly in passages harder than that, but they didn't make any sense to her. On three IQ tests, Terry scored dead on average.

Her family was very sexist, favouring a younger brother. During the time I knew the family, Dad was in and out of jail for theft.

How did Terry do later in her school career? She ended up specializing in hairdressing at the vocational school and left the year she turned 16.

Rapidly recognizing in print words you can speak or understand is essential to progress toward proficient reading, but not enough. A student must also continue growing a vocabulary and learning more about the world, particularly the information essential for school success. Learning this background information means that a child is likelier to know the information the writer of, for example, a textbook, assumes she needn't state explicity because all the readers will know this. Terry just didn't live with a family that talked about the world at supper, watched National Geographic specials, supported extra-curricular activities or museum visits.

If you have a story of someone learning to read, I would like to hear it.

More Authentic Communication, Less Make-Work

Teachers are doing so many things right in primary classrooms I’ve been in lately. Perhaps oddly for a literacy educator, what I like best is that almost all teachers in classrooms today interact with the children in a warm and respectful way and the kids are almost invariably well behaved. They listen, they do their work, they enjoy one another’s company, they like to chat in discussion and at recess or during nutrition break.

Teachers are reading wonderful stories and interesting factual books on topics that children need to know about. Teachers and students are reading and writing together, discussing ways to understand and create text. More often than in the past, teachers are guiding students’ reading and writing of text of appropriate level. And more children are comfortable inventing spellings and taking a stab at writing independently and finding just-right books that they can read independently. Teachers have clearly been working to implement the Early Reading Strategy of the Ontario Ministry of Education.

I wish more educators were replacing small-one-size-fits-all assignments—however clever—and running language arts periods more like production meetings or workshops. It’s not that language arts lessons don’t have a place. Teachers are powerfully assisting students when they teach brief lessons that help children learn skills or information they need to communicate. But the students learn best when they are engaged in talking and reading and writing for extended projects.

Writing short book reports is a common activity in third grade. Often times students create an illustration and write a short commentary. But consider how teachers could extend this to elicit more reading and writing. After the students have drafted reviews—and why not access a database and read professional reviews and download from Amazon a small graphic of the book cover as a part of the prewriting—they could type them into an Excel spreadsheet worksheet and submit them to an editor. The editor could post them to a master worksheet that students could read but not alter.

One advantage to a writing assignment bigger than work that can be started and concluded in a day is that little time need be spent explaining the work compared to how long the work persists. Consider the ongoing work required when older students help younger to produce a class newsletter with work edited to a polished level. Similarly, students who enjoy creating blogs to explore their thinking may read and write a lot. Students need little encouragement to write and read one another’s Another long term project can be guiding students to help create learning materials for their own classmates or students in another grade. There’s no reason students can divvy up projects and find relevant text and graphics and organize them into a presentation that can be saved as a starting point for the next students.

When students want to create high-quality materials that are personally interesting and will be read by other people, they are also more receptive to practical help to do their job better.