Meet me in the Gloaming

            I am figuring out that it is so important to keep fictional reading in the “entertainment” category and non-fiction in the “school” category. The exceptions will be fictional books which include a lot of facts.  Since nonfiction books are not widely read, I want to share a series of non-fiction books that I intend to use in our homeschool with my daughter as she gets older.  Meet Me in the Gloaming by Carol Vinzant will definitely be one of them.

I suppose I should disclose that Carol Vinzant, the author of this book, is a friend of mine.  I have known her for many years and I know that she planned on writing this book for many years before she actually did.  I have a great deal of respect for Carol, and even more since she pushed through a great number of difficulties to publish this amazing book which relates the life of her grandmother.  Carol inherited her grandmother’s diaries, stacks and stacks of them.  She remembers her grandmother puttering around the kitchen when Carol was a child, but she had no idea the exciting life she lived until she began to read what Clemmie had written over the years about events that had occurred. 

 

 About ninety-five percent of this book tells content directly from these diaries, while five percent is fictional conversations which she had to include to show progression which was necessary but was not described in the detail she needed to use.  She worked very hard to keep these fictional sections to a minimum, though, and worked very hard to keep them true to the people involved.  Some members of her family complained to her about including some portions which they did not want published, but Carol said it is part of her grandmother’s story so it should be told.  The title comes from an old hymn of the same name.

 

Meet Me in the Gloaming takes place primarily in Texas, where Clemmie lived all of her life.  Her family struggled financially, which only got worse during the Great Depression.  See life through her diaries as she goes through love and loss.  She struggles to be a spinster school teacher, in spite of her difficulties controlling the bullies in every class in which she taught.  After she marries, she does all she can to keep food on the table and a roof over her family’s head, all the while maintaining her belief in God and keeping her morals high.  She describes events of her time, including an entire town which moved a couple of miles so they could be closer to the railroad (something which happened in many towns in Texas and Oklahoma which were close but not exactly on the track of the railway when it came through).  When available, actual photographs are included throughout the book.

 

If you are studying the history of the United States during the depression era and afterward, I highly recommend you use this book as part of your studies to see exactly what the depression years were like for most families during this difficult time.  There are many situations in this story which will provide discussion points about life as well as giving you a variety of events of the time which you can further research.  I highly recommend reading Meet Me in the Gloaming by Carol Vinzant.

 

http://www.amazon.com/Meet-Gloaming-Carol-Mitchell-Vinzant/dp/1606969749

New Beginnings

Our third year of homeschool is barely a week in session and I already LOVE, LOVE, LOVE our new style!

After spending a lot of time (and blog space) last year researching Classical Education, I knew that was the direction I wanted to go. The book I was reading, “A Thomas Jefferson Education,” is awesome, but the recommendations are more for middle and high school students.  Yes, they do have a list in one of the appendices of books to read for elementary ages, but it just didn’t seem to fit our family.  Since my daughter is starting 4^th grade, though, I wanted to have some type of plan.  (I don’t like “winging it” - for me, that means we would probably not have much schoolwork.)  My daughter’s interests are the same as many 4^th graders, even though her low IQ and other special needs means she is not able to do the same work, which presented a unique challenge. Since Babygirl does not read on level, and gets frustrated if she has to read anything for an extended time, I knew I wanted most of this school year to be built around reading, but I didn’t want it to be just random books we picked up from the library.  Most series books that she could read may be entertaining, but I was not very excited about building an entire year of education on “Junie B. Jones” books.  They’re good to read and have some moral to them, but there still isn’t much depth.

A little more than a year ago, a friend of mine was cleaning out some things in her house and came across a set of “Treasury of Illustrated Classics” books.  She gave them to me – more than 20 classic books that were simplified for younger readers. They gave me the perfect foundation to build our plans for building a great school year.  They are written for younger children, but they keep much of the depth of character and morals, as well as some of the dilemmas, that the classic characters face.  They are also entertaining, able to keep my daughter’s interest.  To get my daughter excited about them, I let her pick out the order we would read the books.

Another problem is that in the Classical Education tradition, books should be read in a limited amount of time. In fact, in the “Thomas Jefferson” book, it suggests finishing one book per week.  I knew that would not happen. These books usually have about 150 – 200 pages each, way too much for Babygirl to read (or even listen to me read) per week.  So, I extended it to one book per 2 weeks. 

Since our homeschool is arranged in 10 sessions of 4 weeks of school, 1 week off, that means 2 books per session or 20 books per school year.  Was it possible for us to read that many books this school year? Would I be pushing her too hard, only frustrating both of us?

To add to the dilemma, the Classical method is to read, write, and discuss the books you are reading.  Discussing our reading is very simple for us, so I knew that would not be a problem.  If we divided up the reading, where she would read some and I would read a lot, I knew we could probably get through the book.  But – writing??? That is another of her big issues. Writing does not come easy at all for Babygirl.  In fact, it is very daunting for her – okay, terrifying would be a better word.  She has come a long way in the 2 years we’ve had to homeschool.  She now draws every chance she gets (I now have to hide copy paper when I buy a new ream or I may find it scattered over the room with one dragon on each page).  That is such an improvement, but letter formation is still hard for her.  How could we “write” this year?  I know we need to, but I don’t want to overwhelm her, which can happen very easily.  (Look back at my first year posts to see how difficult she is to work with when she is overwhelmed)

I decided to journal, which is the main method recommended by the “Thomas Jefferson Education” book. I also decided that we would keep the notebook nearby when we were reading our classical novels and we would write down “interesting vocabulary words” and important events from each chapter.  If nothing else, we would write a sentence summary of each chapter.  I also decided that I would start writing the journal, letting Babygirl tell me what to write.

Wow!  On chapter 2 of the first book, she was grabbing the pencil out of my hand so she could write the vocabulary words.  I am still writing the summaries or any important events, but she now writes all interesting words in the journal.  We talk about what each word means.  Two or three times per week, we read back over what we wrote about the book, letting us summarize the story and remind us what has happened.  Babygirl LOVES the new style!  She is ready for school and she keeps up well with the stories. Right now, she reads the first page of each chapter (usually about ½ to ¾ of a page), then I read the remaining 4 – 6 pages of each chapter.  She is already asking to read more than that one page, but since we are reading 4 – 5 chapters per day, I think she would get tired of reading too quickly.  Maybe next session I will add a little more for her to read aloud.

Yes, we do other subjects as well, and we are still trying to take 1 field trip per week and one trip to the library once every 2 weeks.  Last week, we went to the Oklahoma History Center, across from the state capitol building, since we are studying our state in Social Studies.  This week, the temperatures are dropping to the 90s for highs, so we will start going to the Zoo again a couple of times per month.  In Science, we’re studying about the human body.  Zoo trips this year will let us compare the different types of animal bodies. This session we’re studying skin, including the sense of touch and hygene, so she can focus on differences between the animal skins. We do a lot of discussion, videos, and research on the internet for these subjects.  Math is still very difficult for her, so we’re taking it slow, making sure she understands basic concepts before we move on.  We are also focusing on the “fruits of the Spirit” this year, taking one “fruit” per month.  This month is Love.

Read, write, and discuss is a style which I think will be fabulous for us. Letting classics be the center of our school day (we spend about 45 minutes or an hour daily on reading), she recognizes the value of reading herself. My hope is that by the end of the year, I can let her read independently and then we can discuss it and I can read what she wrote in her journal, but we are nowhere close to doing that yet.  It is still the first time we have had such a successful first week that I am afraid to get overexcited, but I am!  I hope your child's year begins just as wonderfully as ours!

Phonics or Whole Language: Which is Right?

Reading programs boast that they can teach your child to read in a few months.  Professional tutoring businesses guarantee that they can raise your child’s reading ability one to three years.  What is the best way to teach reading?

           

Phonics and Whole Language are the two prominent methods for teaching this basic skill.  The two systems are complete opposite ends of a wide spectrum, yet both have been very successful with children and adults.  Heated debates continue in Teacher’s Lounges and in classrooms all over the world, supporters of each side holding to his preferred method being the best.  It is not new – the debate goes back over 500 years (click here if you’d like more about the history of phonics vs. whole language argument).  The real difference is the person who is learning and the way his brain is wired. 

Phonics is a system where each letter is assigned a sound, and some of them, like vowels and the letter c, are given more than one sound with accompanying rules to explain the difference.  These letter sounds are then added together to create a word.  As the student progresses, he begins to learn more patterns with letter combinations, such as “when two vowels go walking, the first one says its name.”  The problem with learning such rules is that the English language has so many exceptions that it can be confusing to a new reader.  In public schools which support this type of instruction, it is taught from the earliest years, pre-k or Kindergarten, until about third grade. 

Whole Language instruction, on the other hand, takes a very different approach to the same skill.  This method teaches that the reader should look at the entire word and memorize the word.  This begins with a set of high-frequency words, such as the Dolch word list, as well as signs placed near common objects in order for the student to mentally connect the object with its written word.  As the student progresses to more difficult words, they learn word origins and basic spellings and meanings of root words (also called base words).  Latin, Greek, and Old English origins are taught so they can recognize these influences in larger words, which they can break down into chunks of recognized portions and put together to make new meaning.  They memorize affixes (prefixes and suffixes) and use those meanings to add to the understanding of the word.

Which is right?  As you have probably recognized, most reading systems use a combination of the two methods.  This is called an integrated approach to reading, and this is my preferred style of teaching.  You will notice in my other posts about reading instruction that I use the Dolch word list and other whole language methods to teach automaticity with the language, while I supplement phonics instruction to be able to sound out the various sounds and letter combinations.  However, the fact is both styles have been very successful, but the person learning is really the one to determine the best method. 

My daughter, as hard as I’ve worked for my normal, integrated method, learns through the Whole Language method.  When I start breaking a word down into phonics, she panics.  I recently talked to a mother whose son read very early, but he had reached a plateau.  He was diagnosed with a form of dyslexia and could not seem to progress in his ability, which was very frustrating for both of them.  She had tried several phonics courses over the years, and none of them seemed to help.  I suggested she try using more Whole Language.  Use sight words on flash cards (or with technology today, I use PowerPoint). Learn parts of words with their origins, also teaching affixes.  She immediately recognized that when they did those activities, he had done well, so she was very excited to try this approach.

Know your child and help your child learn to read through the method which suits him.  Phonics, Whole Language, and an Integrated Approach all have the potential of teaching your child to read well or confusing them to the point of tears.  Find what is best for him.

Teaching the Classics

              As I put in my last post, I love what I am reading in the book A Thomas Jefferson Education.  It is almost exactly a compilation of all of my smaller theories and putting it together in a way that is supported by research, facts, and experience.  In short, it is a method to Teach Diamonds – meaning to focus instruction on what is truly important and chip off the “junk” that doesn’t really deserve our time and energy in learning.  So, according to this book, what does it mean to teach the classics?

              I am still reading, so I still don’t have all the answers yet.  One thing that professional educators do that I do not see many homeschooling parents doing is to continue to develop your skills.  Teachers in every state have a specific required number of hours that they have to spend developing their professional skills.  I don’t see as many homeschooling moms out there reading books or going to seminars or taking classes to learn how to teach skills to their children.  As a result, many homeschooling moms continually question their abilities to teach their children effectively, though what they are doing continues to show that it is much more effective than today’s public school’s methods.  Just imagine how much MORE EFFECTIVE homeschooling would be if each homeschooling parent would commit himself/herself to take one class or read one book on how to educate every quarter.  There would be no stopping them!  Even if the book or class shows them methods that don’t work (or that don’t work for their family/situation), that knowledge is valuable.  And yet, so many homeschooling parents do very little to try to find more information on how to improve their skills.  My reading A Thomas Jefferson Education is one of my numerous efforts to keep my educating skills sharp, so I can be the most effective teacher as I can be for my daughter.

               Now back to the topic – Teaching the Classics. 

              As I explained in my last post about this topic, titled “Read,Write, Discuss,” this book suggests that education used to occur from a mentor to a student, not from a teacher to a general class which changed annually.  This mentor and student would spend years together.  The mentor would show the student how to accomplish specific skills, but would also have the student read “The Classics,” and then discuss what the student is reading to make sure he understands what is read and help develop the concepts taught in the books further.  Reading the classics, writing notes about what is read, as well as recreating what the authors of these classics are writing about, and then discussing them with the mentor is basically the method used by these types of mentors.  In my article today, I want to specifically list authors that Van DeMille says is valuable.  I don’t want to give you this information in place of reading this marvelous book, but to tease you into reading it.   It is also a reference guide for ME when my daughter gets old enough to read these texts (and a “suggested reading list” for me to read BEFORE she gets there!).

              To simplify matters, I will just list the suggestions Oliver Van DeMille makes for each topic of study.  Remember, as the student reads a book, the parent/teacher should be reading it at the same time.  If it is truly a classic, having stood the test of time, it is worth reading over and over again!  Also, most of what I will list is authors who wrote classics – many of them have many books for you to read.

Literary Classics:  The Bible, Shakespeare, Dickens, Austen

History Classics:  Plutarch, Gibbon, Toynbee, Durant, Declaration of Independence,

Math Focuses:  There are 13 skills which Van DeMille says a student will learn from the math classics: seek and recognize patterns, explore the relationship between things, see similarities and distinctions, analyze logically but with a deep sense that there is a right answer and a set ideal worth detecting, compare and contrast, see things in black and white, see infinite shades of grey and therefore avoid jumping to conclusions, seek evidence for conclusions and check opinion with first-hand research, put his own pen to paper before accepting what society tells him, seek for absolutes, and remain open to surprising new information which makes past conclusions limited though perhaps still accurate

Math Classics: Archimedes, Descartes, Newton, Sophie Germain, Einstein, Euclid, Newton

Science Classics:  Copernicus, Galileo, Agassiz, Einstein, Darwin (even if you disagree with an author, find out about them!  You might find that you know them better than those who say they support them, and they may not even be saying what you have heard they say!)

Foreign Languages: Read classic literature that you have already read (see Literary Classics) in the language you want to learn.  Read the Bible or Shakespeare in the other foreign language, with English side-by-side with the new language.  Also, have 2 dictionaries – a translation dictionary and a dictionary fully in the other language.

“The Arts” Classics:  Study the Masters of that medium (Music, Art, Sculpture, etc.).  Read biographies, as well as study the medium the master used. 

Business Classics:  Peter Drucker, Edward Demming, Stephen Covey

Government Classics:  Locke, Madison, Tocqueville

Psychology Classics:  William James, Freud, Skinner

Biology Classics:  Hippocrates, Agassiz, Darwin

               Looking at this list, I wonder if we will be able to “cover” all of this the 6 years my daughter will be in middle and high school.  The answer is, we probably won’t be able to cover it all.  We will focus on her interests, while throwing in topics that I feel are important (like how to live a Christian life).  The fact is, education should not end after 12^th grade.  Van DeMille says that even if you only study one field, but you know it extremely well, you will have a better rounded education than most students who go through what he calls “conveyer belt” style of schools that most students – in most cultures, not just America – get today.

              Focus your education, and teach the true diamonds!

Word Walls that Work

            As a public school teacher, I loved the idea of a Word Wall.  Add a few words to the wall every week, the students use the wall, and ZOOM!!  Their reading scores shoot way up, right?  Well, not for me.  As a school teacher, I never, not in all of my 12 years of teaching, found a way to make a word wall work (and believe me, I tried multiple ways each year, and listened to more teachers than I could count on methods to use).  This year, though, I think I finally have it – a way to make word walls work.

            My first problem with word walls was figuring out what words to use.  For a while, I tried using “challenge” spelling words.  Then I went to vocabulary words from reading, then science, then social studies.  Then I tried having kids locate difficult words.  None of these seemed quite right.  The theory was that the kids would learn to use the words through a variety of activities.  The problem was if I allowed the students to choose words, they frequently chose words that they already knew well and ignored the words they did not know.  Then, the number of words just kept piling up so that there were so many words, it was useless to me and just looked too busy.  Also, it took so much time on my part – having to first locate the words and then write them and cut them out to put on the wall.  My new method should solve all these problems with the words.

            My second problem with Word Walls was that of organization of the words.  Most Word Walls that I have seen use the alphabet to organize the words.  However, all of my students in 4^th grade knew alphabetical order.  I would break it down and have them alphabetize all of the words under certain letters, but that wasn’t really a skill which I wanted to spend a lot of time on, and the wall took up too much space to justify that being the only skill which I used it for.  I couldn’t figure out how to organize the Word Wall in a way to be useful.  So, we ended up (every year) starting out strongly and then just stopping.

            My third and final problem with Word Walls was figuring out what activities to do with the words.  I would do alphabetizing activities, have them choose their own words to define, have them look for the words on our wall in other books, and classroom activities where the students were to find the missing word  none of these really helped the students in their reading abilities, and they all took a great deal of time which could have been spent more productively. 

            My new method is to use the Word Wall to actually teach phonics in our reading program. To help “Babygirl” improve her reading, she needs to learn “chunks” of words.  Examples of word “chunks” would be –ing, -am, -at, -unk, and so on – parts of words that you can change the beginning letters and make different words. 

            So, instead of using the alphabet to organize the words on my wall, I found a list of word “chunks” that I wanted to use.  My list had way too many to use at once, so I divided it up into four groups, about 12 – 13 in each group, to be used each quarter. 

            To get “Babygirl” involved, I let her help with preparing the wall. I did take the time to write out each of the word chunks for the first quarter, and I had her help glue them onto squares of red construction paper.  She then carried the words, one by one, from the kitchen table to the room where we do most of her school work.  I taped them to the wall (next time, I will probably make it look like a bulletin board, but I needed to know how large to make it).

            After preparing the word chunks, I then picked one chunk and had her look through a book to find a word that fit that spelling pattern.  She used a book that we are using for our Reading Text for this week, and she found four.  I typed those up on the computer and printed them on card stock.  To help learn the words, I cut them out close to the letters, so she can also learn the shape of these words.  I have to say, I really love how it looks!              

 Finally, my last problem is solved because the activities we use are what we would normally do with our reading lessons.  The Word Wall is actually a regular part of the lesson, so it is not just wasted space.

            So far, I love our new creation, and “Babygirl” is very proud of it, too.  It looks like this may be the year of success with a Word Wall!

                                                                                                 

Lexicons

Please take one minute (and eight seconds) to watch these compiled scenes from one of my favorite quotable movies, “The Princess Bride.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-b7RmmMJeo

              “You keep using that word.  I do not think it means what you think it means.”  Have you ever wanted to say that to your child?  I know I do.  Vocabulary is vital to any learning program, and we sometimes give so many vocabulary words to learn at once that we don’t allow our child to really understand what each word means.  How can I help my child really understand the vocabulary that s/he is learning each week?

Less is more.  Limit the number of words your child must learn.  During conversations in the teacher’s lounge, I remember one teacher in particular telling about twenty vocabulary words in Reading, ten words from Science, and 15 words from Social Studies, as well as 5 vocabulary words from Math that she had assigned her students to memorize that week.  She talked on and on about how lazy her students were – that they just wouldn’t study, so she was going to start testing them every day on each subject to make sure they studied. 

This teacher assigned her students fifty new vocabulary words on Monday and expected them to know them well enough to be quizzed on them by Tuesday – inconceivable!  (If you watched the link above, then you should be chuckling now!).  Particularly for elementary age students or students who have a limited vocabulary, NEVER assign more than ten vocabulary words per week.  Not ten per subject – ten total!  Middle school and high school student can learn ten per science subject and ten per social studies subject, but I would not go over thirty vocabulary words per week – total.  That means you have to be careful in picking what you want your student to study.  Don’t choose words s/he should already know.  You can discuss these words for review, but if they should know them, don’t waste their time.  Carefully choose “diamonds” for the words you want your child to learn.

With an extremely limited list of words to learn, your child can develop a depth of understanding for each word.  Lexicons can help you develop this necessary complexity of understanding so that your child will be able to use these words appropriately.  Lexicons, according to dictionary.com, are a dictionary, or a list of terms related to a particular subject.  In education, a lexicon can refer to any chart or form in which you disseminate a word or subject for better understanding.  Most teachers have their own favorite lexicons, and they have usually adapted the one they like from someone else’s.  Because of this, you will rarely find two teachers who like using exactly the same one.  This is fine, and homeschooling parents may even want to adapt their style every couple of years to add new skills which your child is learning.

I personally prefer a lexicon which includes the levels of Blooms Taxonomy.  This is simply a list of six different levels of the depth of thinking required for various tasks or assignments.   I love using a list of verbs which use Blooms Taxonomy so that in my lessons, I can ensure that I am making my student(s) think at varying degrees, instead of simply repeating things back.  Simply repeating, though, is necessary, especially when you are beginning your topic of instruction, so don’t only teach from the highest levels. 

Before I give you my lexicon, I want to explain how I used it every week in class.  I would have my students create a vocabulary book (a new one each week) using two or three pieces of paper.  We decorated the cover with the title of our topic of study for the week.  Then, each page was dedicated to one word.  I had them do numbers 1 – 3 & #7 on the list below for each of the words of the week on the first day.  Then, on the second day, we did numbers 4 – 7 for each word.  On day three, I gave them time to complete the book, since only a few of the students would completely finish.  Each day, and the day of the test, I would have them read over the information, read my definition, and change #7 as needed.  My goal was for every word on number 7 to be a #3 or #4 by the end of the week.  Yes, some students figured this out quickly and simply wrote “4” on all of the words, but most of the students enjoyed changing the numbers as they learned.  My grades on this lexicon booklet were simple:  either 100% or 0%.  Either they did the work – and it was impossible do it and not learn! – or they didn’t do it and got a 0%.

Here is the lexicon which I used:

1)       Write the vocabulary word.

2)      Copy the definition of the word.

3)      Locate a sentence in a book using this word.  Write the entire sentence.

4)      Draw a picture, illustrating the meaning of the word.

5)      Write a caption for your picture, using the word in the caption.

6)      Write either a synonym for the word or an example of the word.

7)      How well do you understand the word?  (write the number from the choices below)

1.       I do not know the word at all.

2.       I know the word a little bit.

3.       I think I know what the word means, but I have a hard time explaining it.

4.       Oh, yeah!  I know that word!

In the beginning of using the above lexicon, I created a poster with the above information.  Then, every week, they would create a booklet and use that same pattern on each page for each vocabulary word.  I did NOT copy a page with that information for each word – that would have simply been a waste of time and resources.  As I have said in several other blog posts, one of my favorite sayings is “The one who does the work is the one who learns the most.” 

I have used several adaptations through the years to this lexicon.  Some items which I used at times were:  word origin, separate the word into syllables, write the pronunciation of the word, create your own sentence (though the caption replaced this one), write a simile or a metaphor for this word.  As you can see, the choices are endless what you can add.  I really don’t recommend adding more than one or two items to my above list unless you delete some items in the process. 

              If your child needs more than thirty minutes per day for this activity, lessen how much you expect.  You may only want him/her to do #1 & 2 on the first day, #3 & 4 on the second day, and #5 and 6 on the third day for each word.  Don’t forget to assign your child to do #7 every day, changing it as your child learns the word better.  Remember – you want your child to really learn the meaning and use of the word, not simply do “busy work.”  If these words are related to work you are doing in other lessons (which they should be), this will serve to enhance your child’s true understanding of these words. 

Don’t worry about your child getting bored with this work. At the beginning, I always had a portion of the class who were bored, yet they quickly got over it when they realized it that they were doing it anyway, bored or not.  Some children get out of a lot of work they don’t like by using this manipulative technique – by simply saying you’re bored, your teacher will change the assignment and the student ends up with less to do!   Also, as my students figured out we were doing it every week, many of my students would simply start making the booklets on Monday and wait for me to give the list of words, if I was not using a list from a textbook.  I just love self-motivated students!  If I ever said we were not doing the booklets one particular week, I always had complaints and confused expressions.  The students loved it, once they learned the pattern, and they really learned to use the words we used with a much greater depth than students in other classes with the same vocabulary list.

              By extremely limiting the amount of words per week your child must learn and by using a lexicon to deepen your child’s understanding, your child can know that “this word means what you think it means.”  The motivational speaker Florence Littauer shows that her father expressed the value of a large vocabulary much better than I can in her book "Silver Boxes":  “If you can speak well, use your words correctly, and talk faster than everybody else, you will always get jobs over people that mumble.”  Allow your child to explore his/her words so he can use them well.

Read to Learn

A few years ago, I was in a teacher’s workshop where the speaker said, “From Kindergarten to third grade, you are learning to read.  From fourth grade on up, you should be reading to learn.”  There is a lot of wisdom in those words.  Somewhere between third and fourth grades, the focus of learning changes from learning phonics to learning comprehension.  This is not exclusive – many children older than third grade need reminders of phonics rules, and children should be learning to understand what they are reading as soon as they pick up their first book – but this phrase gives us focus for our reading instruction plan.  How do you teach a child to read to learn?

Reading should be meaningful.  For some reason which I have never understood, the focus of educational reading has turned to fiction.  There was a great emphasis on making story maps and thinking creatively.  However, my question is:  Why?  Children of all ages (including adults) enjoy learning about things they are interested in – real things.  Why would we take our limited instructional time and teach them something which has no basis in reality and is completely made up?  Even if it has a lesson which we can draw, it is still made up!  This is a waste of time.  Yes, children do enjoy reading fiction, but they get even greater enjoyment from reading things that they can then spend time researching more on their own.  All reading lessons should use non-fictional texts.

When a child reads, he needs to understand the vocabulary in the text.  If a child does not understand at least 95% of what he reads, he will be frustrated and will decide the topic is not for him.  This means that when a child reads, if they miss more than one out of 20 words, they aren’t “getting it.”  It is highly important to prepare your child for reading a text which may use a number of words with which he is unfamiliar.  Giving him a list of vocabulary words might help a little, but giving him experiences where he uses the words will help him much more. 

Let’s say you wanted your child to study biomes (different habitats/environments).  You could hand him a book and say, “Read this.”  You also could send him to a website with information and pictures, or possibly a game where you are matching animals with their correct biome. 

While I believe these are important and should be used in learning, I do not think this is where you should start – whatever the age of your child.  I recommend instead taking a few well planned field trips.  Possibly have your child keep a notebook of plants and animals, as well as non-living things he sees.  He could also take a camera and later create a photo journal or an informational webpage of different habitats which you explore.  Many parks have more than one biome.  Have conversations, introducing a lot of the vocabulary you want him to learn while you walk through the paths (bring notes with you, it’s okay!).  You don’t even have to see everything you want to introduce.  If you want to talk about an animal or plant which you do not see, you can tell stories about it while you walk.  This will give your child an experience connected with the vocabulary that he needs so that he can go back and read a book or a computer website and can build on his experiences.  Even as an adult, I gained from a workshop where we left the college and went to some undeveloped land which the college owned and simply wandered through the fields and rivers with the professors giving us some ideas of what to look for.

Being able to relate to the topic is vital for reading to learn.  You should not introduce history to a child under the age of 12 unless it is about places where he can physically go and look over.  They are still thinking very concretely, and simply reading about events that happened in places where they have never been does not have much to connect to.  As a child gets older, they are better able to relate, but having experiences in the topic greatly increases his ability to learn.

Besides reading about things which a child has experiences with, it is also important that the teacher (or parent) forget about learning the “right thing.”  Why is one piece of information of more importance than another?  If that’s true, then who gets to decide what is so important that everyone should know it?

I used to teach fifth grade and had to teach about the explorers.  We only had about a month to teach this important topic, so I had to pick and choose what the students should leanr.  I decided to focus on the names of the “big” explorers, the country they were from, and the purpose for their explorations.  My students learned a great deal about each of the eight explorers which we studied and they could all explain, to varying degrees, the purposes of each explorer.  Months later, I was very pleased that my students remembered this information.  Then, after they took the test, I proudly asked how they did on the test.  They shook their heads and many of the smarter students told me that nothing we studied was on the test.  I was not allowed to look at the test, so I asked them for an example of what questions were asked.  They told me one of them was “Which country brought horses to the Americas.”  Horses?  That was what the state felt was vital to their learning about the explorers – who brought horses from Europe?  I have to tell you that I had to look up the answer, and I was furious that this was one of the questions when there was so much more that I felt was much more valuable that we had studied.  None of the students could remember one question being asked about what the purpose for explorers were – which I felt like was very important. 

The fact is, different people recognize different things as being important.  If there is something specific you want them to learn, you should state that.  However, most of the learning experience should be allowing the child to explore the topic, through hands-on experiences, reading books, and exploring websites.  The student should also be expected to present what he has learned, whether it be an oral presentation, a diorama, a PowerPoint presentation, a research paper, or a homemade documentary using a regular video camera.  Allow your child to find a way to demonstrate what he learned, and you will be surprised what he will come up with!

The last item which should be taught used to be very commonly used – the “Rule of 3.”  All research should have at least three sources.  Unfortunately, many classrooms today use one source only – the textbook.  If the teacher is able to find a classroom set of another, supplementary book, that provides a second source of information, but they rarely support three sources for the same information.  It is too easy for one text to pick and choose the information to be presented that biases the reader one direction or another.  If a student tries to find three sources, they are much more likely to find valid information instead of the belief of the author of a particular text.  Always read at least three sources to get information about a topic.

Providing experiences related to the topic, remembering there is not a “right thing” to learn about a topic, and reading at least three sources for the topic are all necessary when teaching a child to read to learn.  Do not start with a large, confusing topic.  I suggest you begin studying things around you – things your child may already be interested in or which you may explore nearby.  With just a little practice, your child will soon eagerly be reading to learn.

The Cornerstones of Reading

            Cornerstones are the most important part of the foundation of a building.  The building will fall without a well-chosen cornerstone, so it is important to ensure that these stones are strong.  If you want a strong reading program, you need to carefully make sure all parts of reading are supported. 

            The first necessary step in reading is one which is most common – reading aloud.  Students need to have time every day to read aloud, whether individually or chorally.  This can be a short story, a chapter from a novel, an article from a magazine or a newspaper, or an assignment from a textbook.  If a child reads something aloud, they do not skip sections, as they might if they are reading silently, and they are more likely to pay attention to what they are reading.  If they have a great deal of difficulty reading a section aloud, it may mean that the child is not ready for this level of reading, so it could tell the teacher that they need something different.  Reading aloud is important to any reading program.

            Reading silently is also vital to reading.  I recently heard a study over how much time students in public school spend reading silently per week.  What would you expect?  As a note, this was an average from grades K-12 and I do not know how wide-spread the study was, but it included at least a couple of large metro school districts.  Over a week-long period, how much was expected during school hours to read silently?  The answer shocked me – 50 minutes!  Not even an hour of silent reading per week!  When I heard this, I patted myself on the back.  My fourth grade students kept what I called DEAR Time (Drop Everything And Read) for 20 to 30 minutes at least 4 times per week, plus I had scheduled times in our routine where each day they read one subject’s reading silently.  In our class, we ended up with about five hours per week – more than five times the findings of this study.

            How is that possible?  Was the study flawed?  My thought at first was that the study was wrong.  How could students go through the day and not be required to read silently?  Then I started thinking about the lessons of other teachers which we discussed in the teacher’s lounge, and I started thinking it may not be wrong after all.  I also know that I had to work hard to protect our silent reading time, especially if we were running behind in another lesson.  Most teachers recognize that if children are to read silently, they do not need someone wandering around, distracting them.  If a principal walks into a room and the teacher is sitting behind her desk or at the front of the room, s/he usually assumes the teacher is being lazy (or at least the teachers think they are thinking that).  Most principals require teachers to turn in lesson plans which cover any activity which may occur if they enter the classroom, and reading silently doesn’t “look” as good on a lesson plan as an activity. 

            Think about your reading program – do you have a regular time every day for your student(s) to read silently?  I hope so.  If not, how could you rearrange your day so that you can work it in?  Reading silently gives students time to practice their reading skills, and they should have practice with books of their choosing as well as readings that are required for education.

            A much overlooked cornerstone of reading is listening to someone read aloud.  Oh, for younger children, this occurs regularly because they may be unable to read on their own.  What about pre-teens?  What about young teenagers?  High Schoolers?  Do you read to them?  If not, you should.  In my classroom, I tried to read for at least 15 – 20 minutes four or five days per week.  I chose books which were slightly higher than the class’s reading level, and usually books which I knew they would enjoy (and I would also), but that they would never choose on their own.  Classics such as “Tom Sawyer,” “From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler,” and “Hatchet” found their way into my class every year.  I would also change a few of the other stories with other classics, and occasionally a requested book.  When children have nothing to do except listen to a story, they relax and listen.  They also learn inflection and other vocal techniques which they would never have learned if they were left on their own.  Children who read in a monotone have probably rarely been read aloud to.  Even when my step-daughter was sixteen, we read “The Chronicles of Narnia” together, and we both enjoyed it.  Children of all ages should be read to by an adult.

            Finally, peer reading is a necessary element in any reading program.  This is simply where a student reads with another student. In my classroom, we had at least 3 days per week where we would have peer reading.  Twice were self-directed, once was teacher-directed with our reading textbook.  I always gave students the choice of changing readers after every paragraph or after every page.  The students were allowed to sit where they liked (under tables, in corners, behind my bookcase – they were very creative sometimes).   During the self-directed times, I told them everyone had to have your own book to read.  Then they had a choice:  They could either take turns reading one person’s book for 15 minutes and then read the other person’s book (this would have been my choice, but it was not everyone’s, and that was fine), or they could read one page from one book and then the other reader would read one page from the other book.  This second choice worked well with informational magazines or non-fiction books.  Novels were usually used with the first choice.  It did not take long for this time to be the favorite times of the week.  Even with 14 different conversations going on at the same time, it was easy for each set of students to listen to his/her partner.  This activity greatly helped with comprehension, because the students did not want to admit to their peer that they did not know what the story was about, yet they also did not mind asking their friend for clarification for a specific piece of information.  They would also joyfully exclaim over things which they were both interested in.  As long as they were not being so loud that they were disrupting other groups, I allowed short conversations, as they were almost always related to the book they were reading.

            Reading aloud, reading silently, listening to an adult, and reading with a peer are all important aspects to a comprehensive reading program.  They should all be done several times per week, if not daily.  Even in public school, it is possible to have individualized reading instruction if all four elements of this comprehensive reading program are met.  Students will improve comprehension, fluency, and overall enjoyment of reading if they are given the freedom to read using these four cornerstones of reading.