Blog Week September 13
(Teachers please tell your parents about this blog series. It will encourage quality reading at home.)
In my blog last week, I gave you my definition for reading: “Reading is interacting with the printed page to make meaning.” The key word is interacting. And the interaction comes from the children’s own past experiences Young children need to interact if they are to find meaning. Reading is not a passive act. We must set up connections between the child and the story so they can see its meaning in their own lives.
Consider this illustration:
The “gist” is the meaning. Expert readers link the words, their combinations, sentences, paragraphs and pictures together. When such a reader gets stuck he or she goes quickly back to the words or phrase that has puzzled them to make sense of the meaning once more. They generally do this quickly and return beck to the meaning level in their reading using the syntax clues to reaffirm the meaning.The decoding the skilled reader is doing is not transforming symbols (letters, words) into sound but transforming them into meaning. The beginning reader on the other hand, gets bogged down in the words or sounds and often, even when she or he figures out the sound, misses the meaning.
Therefore the most important help that children need comes from listening to stories, talking about them, understanding the meaning of the written word. W hen you read to and with your child, ask questions about meaning.
Think about last week’s story, Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. Here are some questions you might have asked the child.
“Tell me what happened to Alexander?” Do you think you might be gloomy like he was sometimes.? Why do you suppose that happens to all of us every so often? What can we do about it? You know what I do when I feel like that, I...”
First and foremost interacting with adults by discussing stories that have meaning for them as well as rich language experiences, dramatizing stories, changing endings, all insure your child’s growth in love of reading. Your purpose if you want to help children master the written word is to fill their lives with stories and the pictures in those stories and help them find meaning in them.
The story for today is Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge by Mem Fox, illustrated by Julie Vivas (pre-school to 4th grade)
A small boy, Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge, knows and likes all of the old folks in the home next door, but his favorite is Miss Nancy Alison Delacourt Cooper she has four names, too. Hearing that she has lost her memory, he asks the old folks what a memory is ("Something from long ago" ; "Something that makes you laugh;" "Something warm;" etc.), Wilfred ponders the answers, then gathers up memories of his own (seashells collected long ago last summer, a feathered puppet with a goofy expression, a warm egg fresh from the hen) to give her. In handling Wilfrid's memories, Nancy finds and shares her own. The illustrations splashy, slightly hazy watercolors in rosy pastels contrast the boy's fidgety energy with his friends' slow, careful movements and capture the story's warmth and sentiment. —John Peters, New York Public Library
I choose the concept of Memory as Identity for this story. My outcome is that the children improve their understanding of how memory is important for us to understand who we are.
First activity: Have the children begin by thinking about three things they remember from their past, things they did, things they liked, things that were special. Have them tell or share why they choose those things.
Second activity: Have them choose and draw symbols for those 3 things.
Third activity: Tell them those are memory symbols. And when they see them, they help them remember the time past those symbols stand for. Next have them then choose something from home or in their home they want to share because it has happy memories for them and bring it and share it.
Fourth activity: Read the story either to them or with them.
Fifth activity: Have the children list the “memory things” from the story.
Sixth activity: Have the children interview a senior in their family or a neighborhood friend about one of their happy memories and then draw a picture of that person and a symbol of their memory.
Seventh activity: Have the children share their pictures and their senior interviews with each other.
Eighth activity: Have the children begin a family memory book or a class memory book.
The outcome hopefully is a new sense of meaning about the importance of people’ lives, especially their own.
Wilfrid is truly special book. Read it to a child or a group of children, Be sure they understand the meaning of what Wilfred did and how they might do the same in their own lives.
