Here we go again, it’s ISTEP time in Indiana. As a parent, this translates into free breakfast (not really free, not if you pay taxes), served at school, and no homework to check. As an educator, it translates into a nightmare of schedule changes, kids stress, teacher stress, check, check and triple check of IEP accommodations, leaving us all wondering how it got to this point. I can whine about it, but rules are rules, so I’ll follow them until they are changed. They will not be changed until they are voted on. I was fooled in the last election. Fool me once, shame on you governor, fool me twice, shame on me. I’m whining again so I’ll get to my point. To take ISTEP, you have to read, to text your friends, you have to have to read, to google football stats., you have to read, to order Chinese take-out, you have to read, to join a book club, you have to at least pretend to read. You get my point. Reading is a life skill, and it’s very difficult to manage without it, but how do we get kids to love it? Do they all have to love it?
Much to the chagrin of my speech path. bestie, I do not possess a magic wand. Have children come to the speech room in search of my wand? Yes they have, and I have several, my favorite being a Harry Potter variety that makes a swishing noise when you wave it. It does harbor a kind of magical property. They all want a turn with it, repeating the letters and corresponding sounds on an alphabet chart. This is the exact same exercise done in their preschool and kindergarten classes, I’ve just added a swishy wand and voila, the alphabetic principle becomes a little more exciting.
My boys both had Grandma magic. She taught first grade for over thirty years, then retired to become their babysitter. She read to them, I read to them, Brad read to them, Grandpa read to them, the other Grandma read to them, Aunts and Uncles read to them, and teachers read to them.
They played with “The Phonics Bus”. Never underestimate the power of “The Phonics Bus”, no matter how annoying it may seem to you. You press a letter and it says, “A says /a/ and /ae/”, or “C says /k/ and /s/”. Oh my goodness, the phonics bus knows both sounds! Ian and Luke were being auditorally bombarded with “Flip the sound” reading strategy and they didn’t even know it, they were just playing with a bus. Can someone please create a “Phonics Monster Truck” featuring digraphs?
Our house is filled with things to read. There are books on shelves and books on tablets. We have subscriptions to Sports Illustrated, Better Homes and Gardens, FarmWorld, Guidepost, and in my opinion, way too many fishing and hunting magazines. Do my kids love to read, for hours on end until their eyes get red and creepy like their mother? Ummm, no, in fact, reading is typically their very last choice of a leisure activity. However, they are provided with choices in things that hold high interest for them. So, will they ever voraciously read a novel? Probably not, but Ian is currently looking up all news related to Peyton Manning’s retirement. Luke has a poster on his wall of the aircraft carrier “Abraham Lincoln”. Brad gave it to him yesterday, and he was very excited to read all the names of the fighter planes aloud to us. He said before bed, “I’m just going keep my light on tonight, so when I wake up, I can read this poster again.”
My speech room has lots of books. Many are children’s books that Ian and Luke, sniff sniff, no longer wish me to read to them. Ian cleaned his room and Brad brought me Johnny Tractor and Friends saying, “We’re keeping this one for the grandkids.” Rummage sales of retired teachers are awesome. I picked up a hardback copy of Goodnight Goon and Go Dog Go for fifty cents each. I put books in my window, books on my chalk tray, books on top of the ugly filing cabinets and books on the shelves.
Books provide over half my lesson plans throughout the week. If a child has established his or her sound in sentences, then we quickly move on to books. If they are in preschool, they talk about the pictures/ retell the story. If they are in kindergarten or above, I ask them to bring their book bags to speech. Our classroom teachers are fabulous. Our kids have a bag of “good fit” books they grab, full of books AT THEIR READING LEVEL! I put that in all caps because I can’t emphasize it enough. I’m going to be honest here and tell you that I don’t give a crap about ISTEP, I just deal with it, but I do care a lot about data. A child cannot focus on correct production of an /r/ sound if he’s trying to decode or use his reading strategies to figure out every other word in a text. The teacher can tell me exactly what level Johnny or Susie’s “good fit” (Lexile or TRC level) books are at. I, in turn, can stock my speech room at the beginning of the week with extras. After completion of the read aloud, we can discuss it, and, just like that, we’re into conversation.
I put the “Joke of the Week” on my door. Even if my kids can’t read all of it yet, they will try. Many multi-meaning words and idioms have been explained via the “Joke of the Week”. I don’t care who you are, everyone loves to laugh. I think it’s a great equalizer. Dave Pilkey’s “Dumb Bunny” books are among my favorites. I like to ask my spectrum kids, “Why was that stupid?” First, to see their shocked reactions from my use of the word “stupid”, and second, to help them make inferences. At Montpelier, the older kids like to gather around the speech room door on Tuesdays, waiting for me to post the new joke, competing to see who can be the first one to tell me, “Your joke is lame.” Sometimes they leave me little sticky notes about its level of suckiness. I once replied back in another sticky note, “Ahh, but you read it.”
All joking aside, how DO we know that they read it, and more importantly, understood it? Should we quiz them endlessly on details such as “What color was the boat?” Accelerated Reader will certainly provide that. Both my sons have earned tickets to ball games year after with this program. Did it improve their reading comprehension? I’m extremely doubtful, yet their school system keeps pumping money into this program. The most effective strategies with Ian have been visualizing (What did you picture? What was the movie in your mind like?) and writing down 2 things you thought were important, on a sticky note, every other page. I have sometimes resorted to reading the book right along with him. Although it was painful to Ian, it was not a hardship on my part to discuss To Kill a Mockingbird and The Fault in our Stars with my teenage son. He complained the whole time, but he did pass 9th grade English.
I think it’s important to tell our kids that yes, you are going to have to read things from time to time, and a lot during your school years, that you might find boring. That’s life, get over it! Reading gives us pleasure, but it also gives us knowledge. You need to know that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, that Hitler was a really bad guy that sounded really good at first to all his followers, that Sand Hill Cranes start their migration back north in February. (Just checking to see if you were paying attention on that last one.) Thinking about reading Hamlet makes my eyes go twitchy, but so does the manual for WIDA assessments, and I had to trudge through it, because it was part of my job.
So be it happy reading or crappy reading, just keep reading! It might earn you a seat with Grandpa and free hot dogs at the baseball game. I’ll end with happy, another good quote from Guernsey.
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