A Reader Blooms

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      Because I'm not teaching anymore, it's exciting to talk with young readers at the bookstore and help them find a book they will enjoy. Often they're searching for a book "like" one they've loved before. 

      It's also a wonderful thing to see how much Ingrid and Imogene love books. They spent their final vacation day with me yesterday and part of the day was spent reading together. Ingrid, in third grade, had some struggles at the beginning but is reading well now. She just finished Wonder, partly because she's seen the movie and also because her teacher read it aloud before the holidays. She wrote a letter to an author yesterday about a poetry book I just bought for her and Imogene. We read the book first, discussed it, then Ingrid wanted to write. 

     Imogene is in kindergarten, has loved books from the beginning, yet has resisted any talk about learning to read. The books are read to her, then she takes over, going through the books again, and again, creating the story in "her" words. I don't know why the resistance, but it's been there, until this year. She has been pulled out in a small group to help her learn more and that teacher has done something magical to inspire her. She's beginning to read! And now she points out words that she knows! 

      Often, when the girls are with me all day, they end up creating notes for their parents. This time, Ingrid had already begun, and Imi said she wanted to write a letter to her Mama. She chose a coloring page from the net with a big heart and two roses on it. And she colored it with concentration, filling all the parts in. Sometimes she doesn't do that, but this time, the motivation was there and every part looked good! In the past, she has just written: "Love, Imogene". This time, she says to me, "I want to write more. Will you help me spell the words?" I don't have a picture of the note, too private, but it involved several sentences, a need to show her what a comma looked like, and the spelling of "anything" because she wanted to write, "Mama, you can do anything!"  

       Words for those who work with children come to my mind: sharing beautiful books, patience, and finding authentic reasons and audiences to write.

Discussing Who Owns The Learning - #CyberPD

See this post at Cathy Mere's Reflect and Refine for what's going on with this summer's #cyberPD.  She's also hosting the first conversation of chapters one and two and linking up!  Today, join us here!  Cathy's friends, Laura Komos (Our Camp Read-a-Lot), Jill Fisch (My Primary Passion) are our two other hosts.  Join in, or at least visit to see what others think of this book, Who Owns The Learning, by Alan November.

A thread that appears to be running through the book is the idea that this proposal, the Digital Learning Farm, is based on the idea that in the past, kids who lived on farms had much more authentic work to do with their chores.  And they had to learn the why and how of those chores at least some of the time in order to be effective in their daily lives as contributing members of the family.  They couldn't decide to skip their 'homework' because lives surely depended upon it, the animals they fed, the plants cared for, etc.  He also sites the 'teacher's helper' role of students in one room schoolhouses, and states "The power of purpose and meaningful contribution has been missing from our classrooms and our youth culture for some time."