My fondest memory of literacy involves road trips with my sister and her godmother. My sister and I memorized Shel Silverstein poems to pass the time… and earn money! My sister’s godmother was very generous and I still have Tree House memorized. Now I recite it to my students. I’ve illustrated a large chart with this poem for my class and use it to model fluency as well as track long e sound and spelling patterns. I also share this memory with my students about to model making connections with literature and hopefully connecting with them a little too. Just today, Simon told me he “used my idea.” He has now memorized Tree House as well as a poem he wrote himself. Of course, he earned some money too. I love it. This is what teaching is about.
I feel like I started learning to read with an edition of Cinderella. I read it so many times I only remember its pink hard cover as old and beat-up with worn and yellowed pages. It was that book I made my parents read to me over and over until I had it memorized and could read it myself. Now I have students whose parents say they aren’t really reading yet because they’ve just figured out the rhyme or pattern or memorized the book from so much repeat reading. I tell them that all of that is reading. The majority of my students learn to read in first grade and it can seem like a pretty magical thing. Parents take for granted all the pre-literacy skills required for reading. Beyond knowing the alphabet and having the range of phonics skills for decoding, students need to have a concept of directionality and one-to-one correspondence. Even still, they need to understand what they read. That’s the really tricky thing.
Finding books about real people and the real world made reading meaningful for me. I have read quite a few biographies (Malcolm X, Assata Shakur, Angela Davis, George Jackson). I read Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man in eighth grade. I definitely need to read it again. I understood the basic social problem at play in the book, but imagine I will engage more critically on a second read. Real issues.
The book Billy by Albert French brought me to tears. I’m pretty sure it’s based on a true story. If not, I’m sure it’s someone’s true story. It takes place in the South (US) during the 1940s or 50s. Overt racism runs rampant. A couple of white girls taunt and beat up a black boy. He kills one of them in self-defense. I always feel like I’m ruining the story when I say this, but the author includes it in his summary on the back of the book. They story ends horrifically. They convict Billy of murder and executed him. Unbelievable. No way, I thought. No way could this actually happen. No happy ending. Real life.
1 comment:
I agree with Leensa, teaching reading is a tricky thing. However, any reading is good reading. People learn to read by reading, just like writing is learned by writing. When my parents spend anytime reading with their children I see better results than when they don’t at all. I constantly encourage my parents to show their kids that they have a love for or enjoy reading and their children will most likely mimic the behavior. It is also important that they understand that when a child reads by using the picture or figuring out patterns it is a great step for building lifelong readers.
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