At the risk of being overly laudatory, amen. At the risk of being a little dismissive, duh. Reading is ultimately a selfish endeavor. It's not a secret that children want to read, but we're naive to think that they want to do it to be part of a wonderful, literate community. They want to do it because they understand the immediate benefit to themselves. If we want to encourage literacy, we shouldn't shy away from allowing children to pursue it for their own ends.
Let me share a bit about two of my three children -- one a six-year-old first grade student and one a three-year-old. Ellie, our first grader, was born with physical limitations that kept her from walking until the age of two. She has small lungs and air passageways and for the first few years, needed to spend half an hour daily with a nebulizer doing breathing treatments. The silver lining was that this provided us as parents with a golden opportunity to read with her. In a world (and even a home) that was often beyond her reach, learning to read became a lifeline -- something she could do sitting or laying down that freed her imagination to go to places she could not. She memorized books and then words. She recognized those words in other places. By the time she was three, she was reading fluently. As we sat in bed reading Little House in the Big Woods aloud, she would ask us seemingly irrelevant questions about the text: "how did Carrie get sick?" Turns out she was reading silently ahead of us on each page, wondering about the things that would happen next. Reading mastered, she then started devouring non-fiction books -- especially reference books with lists of words. She had begun creating her own stories in her head and was looking for source material: names of places, people, and things she could incorporate into her storytelling. Now, at six, she is back to fiction and starting to think about the craft of story: what elements, characters, etc make a compelling story? Understandably, she was mildly dismayed when she returned home after her class's first visit to the school library to find out she could not check out a Cam Jansen book. It was in the "green" section of the library, apparently reserved for second graders. Whether it will be available to her later in the year or on special request is unclear, but the question I have is this: what good are phonetically appropriate books if the subject matter is not compelling to the reader and her current literary objectives? Are we seeking to raise a generation that can read or wants to read? Frustrating.
My three year old has, up to now, been far less interested in reading. Whereas his sister was silently reading chapter books at his age, he knows a handful of letters and their sounds, and is nonplussed when he guesses that "basket" begins with L. I would like to say that my wife and I have nobly let him chart his own path (and we have at times), but we have tried to force his hand a bit too. Lately, however, we fished a hundred letter magnets out from under the fridge. His interest in them is largely categorical/mathematical -- he divides them by color, stacks them in groups of three, etc -- but lately, he has been wanting to understand their meaning. "What does this spell?" he will ask, pointing at a JRTQQWB emalgam on the fridge door. Benny could care less about what happens to Laura and Pa. But he wants to know the meanings of his own letter combinations, and as a parent, I am enjoying helping him decipher. He has since asked to read The Very Hungry Caterpillar three nights in a row.
I don't want to suggest that Lyon and Moore are wrong-headed in their emphasis on phonics. But as I see the materials produced by phonics educators to be used in the classroom, I want to pull back on the reins a bit. If we put words in front of children that they want to read, I believe their desire and ability to see the patterns implicit in the texts will grow. I suppose it's a cart-and-horse sort of thing: should we teach reading first through phonetic understanding or first through identifying words and materials the student wants to read? I would suggest the latter.
What do you think?
I would definetly agree with you and I am actually a bit more hesitant than you seem to be. So, I hope I am not stepping on any toes when I say the following because I definitely respect what we learned today and in the reading because I feel that it has its place. While a strong emphasis on phonetics and getting the story out has it's place inside of the education system I'm not sure some educators realize how limiting it can be to others. The child who reads because of the desire to hear the story will work to understand the fundamentals because that will allow them to tell the story they so desperately want to know. Should we just let the advanced child misspell every word when they are capable of so much more? I'm not saying that we as educators should be strict to the point of stunting a childs desire to learn, quite the opposite actually. I want to give the children such a desire to read and tell amazing stories that they put the effort to actually learn the mechanics which will help them suceed throughout their life. Any book that a child wants to read should be made available, the idea of age limits horrifies me!
ReplyDeleteAgreed. But then you probably could have guessed that I would. :) I am a big fan of what Mem Fox has to say in her book about children's reading, and I think that Matt pretty much covered the important parts of it in a roundabout way.
ReplyDeleteLet me just say that Ellie has always impressed me not only with her reading, but her functional use of the written word. I've subbed in her class a few times when she was in preschool, and I still remember the day she asked for my birthday and then demanded I put it up on the birthday list with everyone else's even though I wasn't a regular part of her class. And whenever she saw me, she knew about when my birthday was because of its place on the wall. THAT is useful literacy, and a grown-up didn't tell her to do it. No wonder she likes words; she sees the power and the usefulness in them. She probably never knew my name, but there were words in her life that she caused to exist, and I'm proud to have been the adult present in that small moment.
And just in case anyone thinks Matt might be exaggerating, she really was a fluent reader at that age.
I love how Benny sees meaning in the mathematical, so while I know you're probably itching for him to jump into reading like his big sister, he'll go by a different path. While I know Matt knows this, a good reminder to everyone is that while kids may be doing something OTHER than sharing the page with you, they hear every word you read. In class Benny was always paying attention if he was anywhere near our book collection even if he was doing something different at the time. Kids do NOT need to have their eyes on you in order for their brains to be processing you. It's just harder to know when they're paying attention and when they're zoned into their own thing if you don't use their eyes as a clue. Not only that, but study after study shows that kids who are using multiple senses learn better. So even though Benny preferred to make squares out of pegs, mix colors, or pour sand, I knew from the conversations he had with us that he heard the stories we read. I wish I had an answer as to how to apply that knowledge to classrooms with more, older children, but I hope to hold these memories as I move into the elementary space.
So yes, I do agree that kids need to see a relevant reason in order to learn reading. Otherwise you're just dragging them on a trip in which they don't have a personal interest.