Things to do when teaching reading as joy

Read widely.

Allow free response.

Share what you love to read.

Share ideas about thinking processes which support the enjoyment of reading.  (When have you experienced something similar, whatdoes this remind you of, remember when, those kinds of things)

Teach the craft of excellent texts (word choice, images, structures, patterns, voice), using the language of the craft for discussion.

Talk about literature together. Read reviews and discuss them.  Compare books.  Explore the patterns.  Use media comparisons to expand the nature of texts to be viewed and discussed.

(Pleasures of Children’s Literature)

These things  sound reassuringly familiar.  Anyone find they see their classroom practices in here.

Things not do to when teaching reading as joy

Do not make them read it.

Do not make the decoding accuracy or details the point of the exercise.

Do not make it a competition.

Do not make them finish every book they start.

Do not make the message in the story the point.

Do not follow up with entertaining activities loosely based on the story.

(Pleasures of Children’s Literature . Nodelman and Reimer)

I had to record these. They are so counter-cultural in schools. If we want to create a culture of readers, we need to take away competition, rules, measurement. All the things, that Tiggers do best!

Reading for pleasure – how’s that?

I love to read. I will read almost any genre of text. I have particularly been a lover of science fiction and mystery or spy fiction. I don’t know how I learned to enjoy books. In, The Pleasures of Children’s Literature, Nodelman and Reimer invite the reader to consider which strategies they use to enjoy literature and how they learned them. I am blessed or cursed with a memory for very little prior to the age of 12 and I am not sure if I know which strategies I was taught and when. I know that my mother read to us from early on and continued to read aloud to us until I was at least 12. I don’t know if she taught us strategies explicitly. I expect not but we talked about what she read.

I know I had some excellent English teachers in high school but I couldn’t tell you if they taught me any enjoyment strategies. I do remember the odd lesson on writing and I remember a great many of the books we read.I remember memorizing passage of Shakespeare, although I couldn’t tell you if that enhanced my enjoyment of the plays or not. I do like the bits which run through my head now as a result. “It is the east and Juliet is the sun.” “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet” “To be or not to be that is the question, whether it is better to…”hmmm. Now I’d just Google it, if I really wanted to know.

I know that I visualize particularly effectively. I don’t remember anyone ever teaching me to do that. I do know that I can finish reading a book and some months later, I can not recall whether I saw it as a movie or in a book. The images are clear and vivid. I had considerable trouble in the first Harry Potter movie, when Ron and the twins looked wrong in comparison to the book. I got over it by the second movie but as accurate as the rest of the casting seemed those did not fit the images in my mind.

As a parent and teacher, I watch and teach my children with enthusiasm, the strategies I think will help, when I think they will be of assistance. My son is a new reader, although he has had a reading identity for some time. He uses all kinds of strategies. Mostly innately. I don’t recall teaching him to question the text or wonder aloud but he does it. I have taught him some cuing skills to deal with decoding but nothing deliberate about enjoyment.

I wonder about teaching pleasure. What can I teach to teach enjoyment of books? It is an interesting question. I’ll see what comes up.

Trouble with Liveblogging

I tried to live blog today. For some reason when I went to save my post it was lost. I don’t know if it was a server problem or a connection problem or an error on my part. It is frustrating though. I think I would probably just open up in word next time and at least have a digital form or my notes. But I can’t directly copy from Word into WordPress, a small but understandable frustration with the difficulty translating between applications and clearly a problem with being a ‘slave’ to business controlled apps. I am not savvy enough as yet to navigate the world of open source and find a solution to my problem should it exist. But it is something to consider in the educational forum.

I don’t personally want to figure out coding from all the possible angles but on the other hand, I hate being strung up by the limitations of not coding for myself. For instance with my website – which I created with Dreamweaver. I don’t know enough code to add and take away things without doing it from the University where I have access to Dreamweaver software and in fact, I don’t know if I even can get at the code which was created with Dreamweaver from ‘outside’. More reasons to know more. I wish I had a handy-dandy thirteen year old at my disposal. Maybe my son will turn into one of those kind of thirteen year olds. Only 7 years to go!

Goal Setting – Not usually my department

I got tagged.  I love getting tagged.  It feels like a online hug so I feel compelled to take part in the meme despite the fact that I’m not my family’s goal setter, it is my husband’s job to dream big.  I ask the hard questions.  “How, when, in what order and Are you crazy?”

So here are my goals and here’s where it started.

1)   Publish in a scholarly journal.

2)    Write children’s books – one on images of God, one on my own history and the history of this place I call home.

3)    Become a teacher librarian.

4)   Reduce my environmental footprint and my dissonance with my position as a person of wealth in a world  precariously over-stretched.

5)   Work on my mom-identity and  spend more quality time with my children.

6)    Bring joy to my workplace.  Watch for my own cynicism.

7)    Say positive things about people and mean it.

8)    Paint more, sing more, play more.

9)    Share more easily of my resources.  Need less stuff.

10)    Read things that are worth reading and some fluffy stuff just for the joy of it.

Consider yourself tagged if you read this post.  Let me know if you perpetuate the meme.

A colonial brain trying to be post-colonial

I have been attending Congress 2007 and am trying to process some of what I have taken in there. I have attended quite a number of workshops but most of them have carried a similar thread about the importance of telling stories, hearing stories, writing stories and talking about stories, particularly our own stories through autobiography.

Laara Fitznor – a Cree woman and professor – told her family’s story and wove it together with the history of the First Nation’s people of Canada. She is a strong and intelligent woman. What she told rang in my memory for the next few days and I am trying to break through my cognitive dissonance and find a resting place. She talked a bit about where we are in the story that has been written between First Nation’s and Metis people of Canada and the rest of us. She talked about our being in a place where we can re-story to work as allies and open up spaces within society for the growth of Indigenous peoples and their contributions to society in Canada.

I want to be a part of the retelling, the re-storying. I am not sure what my role is but it has made me wonder about my reaction to the story of “Snow Tunnel Sisters“. Is my reaction to the story grown out of an inability to appreciate the nature of Metis storytelling? Is my ability to critique literature inhibited by my own identity as a colonially-educated white middle-class female? There are times when I am deeply aware of myelf as a person living on the land of a disposed people. This is one of those times. I definitely to take more time to think on this and find my story, particularly as it relates to my being a treaty person, that is, a party to the treaty which resulted in my being able to own land, become educated, have family, etc. here in Canada.

Snow Tunnel Sisters – Leah Dorion

Snow Tunnel Sisters is the story of two sisters and their time together in the winter.  The story told with the express purpose of showing the experiences of a loving Metis family and in particular the two sisters as they play in the snow.  The story could have used some rewriting for added tension and more expressive language.   The illustrations are warm and inviting.  As with Snow, this story has been told with more finesse elsewhere.  However the story may prove useful for depicting loving relationships within Aboriginal or Metis families.  I wonder if this is accomplished more powerfully in stories such as Andrea Spalding’s.

Fox walked alone – Barbara Reid

In Fox walked alone, Barbara Reid spins a story to explain how the animals came to Noah’s Ark.  An interesting companion to her Two by Two story which follows the story of the Ark.  Rhyming couplets and engaging art make this story an enjoyable read.  Barbara Reid knows how to vary perspective and add details which catch the reader and draw them into the pictures.  Although the text is fairly simple for young readers there are some well-chosen words which give the text richness.  Rhyming couplets can sound forced but this texts trips along without feeling trite. The story would fit thematically into units on weather, animals, survival, legend, repeated addition.

Snow – Joan Clark

In Joan Clark’s Snow, a young boy imagines what is under all the mountains of snow which cover his neighbourhood through the winter.   The story is simple and seems a pale comparison to Ezra Keat’s Snowy Day but the illustrations are lovely and invite further imagination and extension by the reader.  The ending certainly draws a smile.  Young readers would be able to read this story with confidence as the language and structures are simple and are repeated.  I wish I could change a line when the boy starts to imagine what is under the snow and repeat his mother’s questions of “What are you doing?” so that it would foreshadow the final line.  Themes in the story would fit curricular objectives for weather, winter, imagination, changes, childhood, story construction. 

Rex Zero and the End of the World – T. WynneJones

I like the fresh new paper of Rex Zero. I know it’s irrelevent but it is one of the pleasures of reading a new book, if there was a date stamp I’d bet I am the first to crack this book.

This book can be classified as historical fiction but feels more deliberately fun versus history. The layer of information for learning adds dimension to the story. I like the careful writing – descriptive, a little sarcastic. Once in a while the author gets a little heavy on the figures of speech but it wasn’t distracting in more than one or two places. I enjoyed the picture which formed in my mind of this boy and his family.

One of the parts I particularly enjoyed was of the boy using a paint-by-number kit. He reverses the colours to see how it will turn out. I had the Franz Marc “Blue Horse” come to mind. Perhaps because of the reference earlier in the work of a famous painting “Jesus or somebody all riddled with arrows”. It was fun to search the recesses of my brain for “St. Sebastian”. The author seems to have written for young people but without dumbing it down. I like the levels that it works on and the fact that as an older reader, there are little parts that a student might miss but that I can enjoy. It’s like Shrek or Veggie Tales, humour for adults and children.

This story blends mystery (Is there a panther loose in the park?) and history (cold war era) with a classic ‘new boy in town’ frame. It is an entertaining read and has some delightfully humorous moments. Thematic possibilities include Cold War, family, moving, Ottawa, summer time, change, ampathy, friendship, respect, old age, illness, compassion. Male main character, strong female characters as well, short chapters but not a short read. Most likely suit readers grade 5-8. Great read aloud potential.

Tim Wynne-Jones.