The March Slice of Life Challenge at the Two Writing Teachers blog - Thanks Stacey and Ruth, for giving us this challenge.
Yesterday was World Read Aloud Day. Mary Lee Hahn wrote a beautiful post on her blog, A Year of Reading, of why classroom teachers read aloud to their students. I won’t try to say it again; her reasons are beautiful and persuasive. However, I do have a brief story of a read aloud that turned into something so important in my classroom future.
One motivation I had when I chose the books to read aloud was to find a book that fits the class needs. One year students in my class didn’t seem to be meshing very well into a community, and they were not supportive in ways that I thought important. They didn’t show much sympathy for others, and needed help in walking around in other classmates’ shoes. I chose to read the book My Left Foot by Christy Brown. As we talked about his life, both the teasing he endured and the love he was given by family and some of his siblings’ friends, I was able to bring the stories into our own personal lives, to include the challenges others we knew faced every day. The book brought us to realizations that people are able to face huge obstacles and bring joy into their lives despite those obstacles. It was a book that changed the classroom feel, and I am convinced that reading the book together helped me guide the class community into a better understanding of others, and of themselves. For those of you who don’t know, I teach in an independent school and taught middle school aged children for many years. I am now the literacy coach for my school. When I taught I always had students for two years, sometimes three, before they left for high school. The summer after I read My Left Foot, one of my students had a terrible accident and lost an arm. Of course, I couldn’t have known this was going to happen, but the fact that the year previous this student had participated in all the discussions and had heard the book read with his returning classmates made all the difference in welcoming him back with the incredible challenges he was facing. Was it serendipity? Was there some higher power helping me choose this book? I don’t know, but I do know that this and other books have helped me be a better teacher for my students. This is just one example. I imagine you who are teaching have one, too.