Literacy #6

I remember once hearing about a teacher who asked he students to honestly answer this question: During independent reading time last year, did you ever pretend like you were reading when you really weren't? I thought that this was such an interesting thing to ask students, and I decided that is something I would like to use in my own classroom. But then... I thought about it some more. If the students admit to pretending to read, what am I going to do to fix this in my class? Why would I be any different than previous teachers? I found ch. 5 in Literate Lives and ch. 2 in Growing Readers to be very helpful in coming up with ideas to address this question.

Immediately, the thing that jumped out at me in ch. 5 was the idea that "reading and writing are not silent activities." Students don't like having to sit still and be silent any more than I do. How can I expect them to gain anything if they are not interested in silent reading. At Haw River this week, I had such a positive experience with my literacy lesson. I was only working with one student, but our discussion was far from silent. We read the story Mean Soup by Betsy Meritt together and acted it out.

"... Then, taking a breath, she screamed into the pot. 'Your turn,' she said. So Horace got on a stool and screamed, too. His mother screamed louder. Horace growled and bared his teeth..." These are few lines from the book that we acted out together. We pretended to be screaming into a pot. We got up onto a chair and screamed some more. We growled and showed our teeth. He picked up so much more vocabulary because we were able to show it to each other. I could see how excited he was about the story, and I really felt like he enjoyed reading because of the activity involved with the reading. Reading can't always be silent. I think he will come away from yesterday enjoying to read that much more because he wasn't sitting alone and being asked to be quiet. I noticed throughout the day that he also had a lot of trouble sitting still. The way the teacher would scold him every now and then made me realize that he probably gets in trouble a lot for not being still. He would gain so much more from reading if it is made into something active for him to do.

I realize, however, that we can't plan an activity for each individual student, and they do need to be reading on their own. I recognize the important of a read and share. I liked the idea of a reading conference as well as sharing with a partner. I was very impressed in ch.2 by the students who groan when reading time is over because they have run out of time. What a wonderful problem to have. I hope that I can engage my students that much that they don't want a lesson to end.

There is a student in my placement who really likes to draw. He has checked out a book that teaches how to draw dinosaurs that he keeps with him at his desk. Every day, he asks if he can look at this during independent reading time, and every time he is told that he needs to be reading a chapter book. Obviously, he can't read from this art book every day; he does need to learn to look at different kinds of text, but it really saddens me that he is never allowed to read this one. I would like to encourage him to use this once a week or after he has read a chapter in his chapter book, etc.

I still don't feel like I have a full grasp on what should be used to make independent reading the most beneficial that it can be for the students, but I think that these chapters and my experiences this semester have really helped me to start answering the question.