Blog Week August 23, 2010
This week I am starting a series of blogs with ideas on how to enhance literacy in small children. I begin by asking you to answer the question, What is reading? Sounds like a “duh” question, it’s not. Seriously, what does it mean to read? How may reading teachers take the time to help their students discover what reading really is. I’m asking you for your definition of reading. How do you define it? Look away from this text for a moment and think about it. Maybe even jot down your answer.
I have found, to my surprise, that we teachers often fail to get to the core meaning of what we teach. Remember we are so confident that we know what we are teaching, we often fail to really think about it.
Let me tell you how I realized I needed to go deeper into what reading really is. This is a true story of a child I remember well and with great fondness. John was in a Special Ed class I taught. He had Down Syndrome and I was told he would never read. He was a great happy kid, a joy to be around. But it bothered him when I sat with the children in various reading groups that he could not do “this reading thing” “What is it, Mrs. McCarthy?” he would say. “What are they doing? Where do the words come from?” I admit, to my surprise, I did not have a ready answer. How often we teach without really taking the time to know exactly what things are at their core level. I needed to think about how to explain what reading is to John.
John had a bunny. Not a day would go by that he wouldn’t tell me about Jock, his bunny. So one late afternoon in an empty classroom, I wrote a story about John’s bunny on the front blackboard. I wrote only three sentences, and I wrote them large. Those three short sentences took up the whole front board stretching the entire width of the room.
The next day when the children asked why that story was on the board, I told them I could only tell John because it was his story. Of course, he could hardly stand not knowing, so right then and there he asked if I would tell him what those words were on the board. I told him it was his bunny story, his Jock story. I left it at that and had the class begin the day’s work.
John stared at the board for some time off and on throughout the morning. Then when the children left for lunch he stayed behind. “Mrs. McCarthy, how are those lines on the board my Jock story? I don’t know what you mean.” I told John that I loved his story, but in the late afternoons when he left on the bus, he wasn’t there to tell it to me again. So I decided to write the story so I could read it when he was not there. He paused and then asked, “This is how you know about Jock when I’m not here (he hesitated a moment and then slowly pronounced the word) you read it? How do you do that?” I asked if he would like to try to read his story with me. He responded with a major head nodding, YES. I took his hands in mine and we faced the board and I cupped his hands around each word as we walked from left to right across the face of the board, back and forth three times reading his story.
“John has a beautiful brown and white bunny.
He lives in John’s backyard in a hutch.
When John pets him, Jock wiggles his nose.”
Great big grin. “Let’s read it again, Mrs. McCarthy, let’s read it again.”
And so we did, again and again. And the stories on the blackboard kept changing and growing in difficulty. Then we switched to books. In the weeks that followed I explained to John and the other children that reading is finding meaning about all kinds of different things. Words and ideas have meaning for the people who write them and they often have meaning for us. When we read, we get ideas from people we might not be able to meet and talk to in person. Reading is language in people’s heads that becomes ours to think about.
By the end of that year, my friend, John, was a reader.
My Definition: Reading is interacting with the printed page from prior knowledge to construct meaning.
Young children need to experience the interaction to find the meaning. Reading is not a passive act. In this series of blogs I will give concrete examples of how to do that.
Please This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it me your definitions of reading, I would love to see them.
