So We're Starting a School....

Yes, that's right. Starting a school, from scratch. We have our second open house tonight. We have been working on this for about a year now, and so far everything is in place. Next month we will hand it over to an administrator and trust that it goes the way we have planned.

The thing that concerns me the most is fulfilling the answer to one of our most important values- individual student achievement. I have a huge desire to stay away from over labeling, pulling students out during important instructional time, and leaning heavily on standardized assessments. How do we create a learning environment where students are able to sit down and learn what is appropriate for them, not being confused or bored? There has to be better answers than testing them every month and pulling students out that need more help out but then expect them to be responsible for the information they missed.

Some of the answers we have come up with are smaller class sizes, we're capping at 25 students per class in elementary and 20 in kindergarten, and the use of other types of assessments- anecdotal records, self assessments, etc.

Those of you who are teachers- if you were able to create the ideal classroom, how would you answer this problem?

Ability AND Motivation

Jaron, my five year old son, has been able to identify all the letters and their phonetic sounds since he was two and a half. After learning the sounds he promptly stopped having any interest in growing his ability to read. I thought, "No big deal, he's only two, I'm not going to push it." and then I said the same thing when he turned, three and four, but last summer when he turned five, I thought maybe I would push him a bit since it seemed obvious that he had the ability. He had long since learned other pre-reading skills, like rhyming beginning letter sounds, ending sounds, and some phonetic rules besides basic letter sounds. I began with phonics, and he quickly learned rules like, "when two vowels go walking the first one does the talking," and the "silent e," but when I sat down with a book with him, we would quickly find a work that did not follow the rules he had learned, or any phonic rules at all, and he would throw the book in frustration and refuse to try again. Jaron is a major perfectionist, so his response was a bit more extreme than most, but I understood his frustration. I do not question the need for phonics, but I am beginning to wonder if maybe it was not the best place to start with Jaron. We also have redl out loud to him all his life and have now read approximately 50 chapter books to him in his life. He loves to listen to us read to him and associates reading with spending time with me and his dad. I wonder if this also plays in his lack of motivation to read for himself. I think maybe he is afraid if he learns to read we won't read to him anymore. Another possible lack of motivation is that the books he could read independently do not have the more complex character development and plot as the stories he enjoys listening to. This point I question because he still enjoys listening to the more simple books we read his sister.

I am trying a few things to see if they help his motivation to read. First and most importantly, I'm releasing my expectation for him to be an early reader. I always expected this from him because he has been early at everything else, especially math, and because he learned his pre-reading skills so young. He does not need this pressure and is certainly not behind. I also don't want him to loose the enjoyment of looking at books, gleaning what he can about the story from the pictures and listening to us read to him. Secondly, I'm pointing to the words as I read to him. Lastly, I occasionally ask him to take turns reading pages in a book as I read to his sister. He can easily do this since we have been reading those same books to him for two or three years. He still is very hesitant to read a new book to us, even if it is REALLY basic and I know he could do it. Every once in a while I ask him if he would like to try, about 50% of the time he does, but I don't push it too hard.

In a few months I'll post again about this and see where we are at!

Comfort Reading

I must confess. I am a comfort reader. The busier life is, the more I read, not less. Why? Because the books I choose at this time comfort and soothe me. They tell me life is the way I would like it to be rather than how it truly is. My favorite author to read when I am looking for a comfort read is Jane Austen. Her writing style lulls me, makes me feel a little less strongly about everything and colors the sky blue. She stands up for her sex in a way that makes her readers proud to be a woman (lets face it not many men read Jane Austen books). However, when you look at the other authors of her time, the Bronte sisters and Charles Dickens for example, and the historical and political events of the time, it is obvious that she is not giving a complete picture of life in England. In my comfort reading, that's fine with me. I don't want a real picture. I just want beautiful words and courageous characters.

My whole point of this in not to harp on Jane Austen, but more to harp on myself. It is amazing how we can use books to create at world around us that protects us from the realities we most hate or fear. We choose our genre, time era, etc. to fit the world we want to live in, to hedge into when life becomes overwhelming. Of course, the authors have done the same thing, they write about the world they have created. How amazing some of those worlds are! JK Rowling's is so amazing that she has drawn an incredible amount of people into it too. No wonder is was so hard for her to end it, to end the world that she has lived in for so many years.

Even dark literature do not live in reality. They pull out for us what the author most wants his or her readers to see. The pain and deceit, but these authors are not showing the whole picture and color of life either. Poe certainly does not give us a clear picture of reality, nor the other Gothic writers. They write for reaction.

Since we all live in our own realities, is it possible to write the world as it truly is? No. Most definitely not. From our backgrounds we all pull in different aspects, colors, virtues, religious tones. The question is, is there only one reality? Are all the worlds we live in true secluded from the rest or should they be balanced by other worlds? Should my beautiful English country side world be balanced by Virginia Woolf's tints added by the industrial revolution's impact on England as a whole? Should by view of the life of the pioneers painted as a child by Laura Ingalls Wilder be impacted by Willa Cather's shading of societal impacts as the communities evolved? And another question- if it were possible to write life objectively, would anyone read it?

Lily's Library

I am currently reading The Read-Aloud Handbook by Jim Trelease and really appreciated the story about a little girl named Erin and how her mother had made a journal of her experience with books beginning at birth. Its too late for me to start so early, but I thought I would still give it a try and see if I notice patterns of success or frustration in the whole process of learning to read, beginning that first day a book is put into those chubby hands and that wet little mouth.
Lily, now two and half, has always loved books better than any toy. When she first was able to reach out an touch, she loved the Touch and Feel books. By the time she was eighteen months old she would sit on the couch by herself for forty-five minutes with a stack of books on her left hand side and carefully read through each one and put them in a pile on her right side. She would tell the story in her own language and every once in a while we would recognize a phrase that was on the page of the book she was looking at, like "Down down down!" from Cat and Mouse in the Rain by Tomek Bogacki. She then went through a phase that lasted about nine months where she would not let anyone read a book to her, but wanted to read familiar stories all by herself, and if you messed up her piles, she would let you know! This show of independence in reading is very encouraging to me. I am curious to see if it evolves into independent reading at a young age. My prediction is that it will, but I am willing to be wrong. I do not plan on pushing her into it sooner than she is ready.
Now she is starting to want to discover new, longer books and will tolerate me as a part of it since she does not know the stories to these new books by heart yet. Although the majority of the "new" books have plots that are too lengthy for her to understand (I think), she is still finding so much enjoyment in the language. One of her new favorites is The Story About Ping by Marjorie Flack and Kurt Wiese. She gets so excited for the phrase, "La la la la lei!" that when I start the read the last sentence on the page that is before the page that has this on it, she gets off of my lap and starts jumping up and down saying, "Wa wa wa wei!" with the exact sing-song intonation I use.
Her vocabulary is hilariously filled with common phrases and idioms such as, "I can't see and thing," "I can never go to bed," "That's a great song," and "He's a big old baby!" but she still cannot create her own grammatically correct sentence. We do not watch very much TV, so I think these most likely come from her literary exposure. It will be exciting to see where her love for books takes us in the coming months and years!

My Garden of Literature

From Science Fiction, to Classics, to Fantasy to Non Fiction, I love to read. I'm learning so much about myself and my opinion through it all, but more importantly, I'm learning all the questions I have that I never knew I had before. Questions like, what author is NOT influenced by religion? I mean really, there are so many books out there with moral and ethical guidelines, Christlike figures, etc. And, how does what I read change my opinions? Do I want to have those opinions, or am I just simply a product of my environment, spouting the opinions of those put into a position of authority over me, either by force or by my personal choice? Then come my questions about reading itself. Should reading be so influential, rather than personal experiences? Do I allow characters in books to live experiences so that I can enjoy the feelings and emotions without actually ever having to be in danger or leave my living room? How do I want reading to effect my young children? Should I concentrate on teaching them to read, or should I just continue to read aloud to them making reading a bonding time, making reading a symbol of safety and nurture? That brings me into the question, what is my philosophy on reading? And learning altogether? I'm part of starting a charter school in our town and the curriculum was already chosen when I joined. Since I have a decent amount of educational background, I have done a lot of the representing of the philosophy of education we have chosen and it makes sense to me, but I never really questioned it. I just said, "I can see how you could come to that conclusion." While I'm not saying its wrong, I'm slapping my own hand for not at least hearing the other side of the argument.

So, from my opinions on what I read to how to learn to read, I will be documenting my personal discoveries on what might end up being a fairly disjointed blog. Feel free to come with me on this journey and question my ideas until I can defend my ideas because they are truly what I believe, not just what I heard someone I respect say.