Image credit: Briam Cute via Pixabay
By The Educator Collaborative Associate Member Heather Lippert
In third grade, my class gathered on the rug while my teacher read from Louis Sachar’s Sideways Stories from Wayside School. We giggled at the jokes and the joy in the stories. All throughout my elementary school years in the 1990’s, we got lost in stories. We wanted to live in a boxcar and dine on milk and blueberries. We wanted to watch Ralph zoom around on toy motorcycles. We dreamed of having our own telephone line in our bedroom for our own babysitters’ club.
My experiences in elementary school happened long before the crushing pressure of standardized tests and the panic of students not reading “at grade level.” We were lost in the stories before “science” ruled everything.
Today, many primary teachers are warned against spending “too much time” on comprehension. If you teach primary students, some folks say, the majority of time needs to be spent on systematic phonics and decodable texts. You see, they tell us, young readers have to be solid on how to read before they can even begin to think about what they are reading.
As a Kindergarten teacher, I began reading chapter books aloud to my students (along with more traditional picture book read-alouds). Starting with short chapter books like Junie B. Jones, by the end of Kindergarten we were reading from The Mouse and the Motorcycle and The Boxcar Children. Every time I pushed into a “harder” chapter book, I wondered if these young students would stay engaged.
The results were amazing. I would finish reading and the chanting would begin: “Read more! Read more!” The discussions, rooted deep in social emotional learning, sprang up naturally from the chapter books’ rich stories. One day a kindergartener raised her hand and said, “Ms. Lippert, it is just so sad that no one wants to be friends with Roz” (from Peter Brown’s The Wild Robot). This led the class to engage in a discussion about friendship: What could Roz do? What could the other animals do? How could they help? This year, I read Dawn Quigley’s Jo Jo Makoons: The Used-to-Be Best Friend and my first graders giggled along with Jo Jo’s jokes, creating a warmth and joy in the classroom. My classes were getting lost in the stories.
Decoding is essential. All students need to learn how to read the words on the page. However, if we only focus on phonics and decodable texts, we lose all of the magic of stories and learning. We lose the rich vocabulary we find in chapter books and the complex problems that the characters have to solve.
It is important that primary teachers carve out time to experiment with chapter books, to expose young children to the richness that comes with these texts. Primary teachers should find texts that connect with their students and immerse them in deep stories and characters. We should practice using chapter book plot points and character development as places to engage in discussion and teach social emotional skills.
Ahead of the movie release in September 2024, I brought last year’s first graders into the world of The Wild Robot. As we finished one book, they asked for the next–and then the next–until we finished the series. They then wanted to watch the movie trailer over and over. They made comments about parts of the book they recognized, parts they forgot about, and how characters looked the same or different from what they imagined.
As I took the class out to recess early one day, I heard a group of six students screaming on the field. I ran over to them, worried there was an emergency. The kids stood back from a mother duck and her goslings.
The students were yelling, “It’s Brightbill and babies!” They had pulled The Wild Robot into real life and their imaginative play. The magic.
We can’t lose the magic for the sake of science.
