by Tom

I’ve always believed that preparation is the best way to compensate for an inability to improvise. Improvising in the classroom scares me. Which is exactly why I tend to be somewhat extreme in regards to lesson preparation. I still engineer every lesson to the minute, even after twenty-four years on the job.

That includes our 30-minute silent reading time. I carefully teach my students how to select books from different genres at their independent reading level. I make sure they have time to share and tell about their books, I make sure to give them lessons on decoding and comprehension strategies. I do everything I’ve heard I’m supposed to do to make the most of this 30 minute time. And it works pretty well.

Well, almost…

Last year I had a student named Jackie. She came from Guatemala about six months earlier and was just starting to learn English. Reading was very difficult for her, and I struggled to find a productive way for her to spend our 30-minute silent reading time. Mostly she would page through books, telling herself stories in Spanish that I assumed matched the pictures. Although I would frequently try to read with her, I didn’t have many materials at her instructional level, and I would usually end up just reading to her. Which was fine, except that I had 26 other second graders with their own issues. I was constantly on the move; keeping kids on task, helping them find appropriate books, asking them to tell about their stories, and resolving disputes over got to read the dinosaur book with the giant eye on the cover and the cool picture of a meat-eater with a mouthful of bloody hadrasaur flesh. I was always busy doing all the things I had planned to do during our 30-minute silent reading time.

Jackie was always there, though, with her soft voice, telling stories to herself in Spanish. I assumed she was probably doing something important in her progression toward literacy, yet I couldn’t figure out how to get her to transition towards reading in English. It was frustrating. I couldn’t plan my way out of the situation.

One day she grabbed Green Eggs and Ham off the shelf. I’m not sure why. Maybe it was the pictures, maybe it was just by chance, but she took it to her desk and started telling herself the story. I was between crises, so I asked if I could join her. We took the book to my desk and started reading. I would read a page to her and then we would read the same page together.

Would you like them in a house? Would you like them with a mouse?

After a few minutes, Senay wandered up. Senay never reads. Not if he can help it. He knows how to read, but he just doesn’t care for it. But there he was. “Can I read with you guys?” I hadn’t planned for this. It was supposed to be just Jackie and me. But I said yes and the three of us read.

Would you? Could you? In a car? Eat them! Eat them! Here they are!

Then Gabe joined us. Gabe struggles with reading too, and he can never find a book that looks interesting with words he can read. I spend a lot of time finding stuff for him to try. But there he was. I wasn’t real comfortable with three kids up there, reading the same book. It was getting crowded. Jackie, on the other hand, was loving it. She had never read with other kids before, and they were all asking to join her. So we continued.

Could you, would you, with a goat?

And then Abby joined us, but only after she carefully marked her copy of Pony Pals Number 4, Give Me Back My Pony, (The one where Lulu nearly loses Snow White to Rema, who doesn’t even deserve to have a pony, because she’s mean.) This was too much. Abby read chapter books. What was she doing with us? She didn’t need to be. But she was.

I do not like them, Sam I am.

By the time Sam and the other guy had landed in the water amid the goat, the fox, the mouse and the people from the train, there were about eight kids at my desk. Good readers and non-readers. Jackie couldn’t have been happier. The book ended, and the other students wandered away, back to their seats and their other books. Jackie asked if she could take the book home, and when she came back on Tuesday she could read the whole story to me. Independently. She read her first book. She read that thing every day for the rest of the week, over and over.

At one point I decided to ask her what it was about. “Tell me about the book, Jackie; Que pasa en el libro?”

“He don’t like the food. He eat the food and he like it.”

Indeed.