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The Best Books Are Ones You Create YourselvesSep 17 '01 Write an essay on this topic.
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The Bottom Line Be creative in your ways to take a simple book and make it relevant to a child's life.
How limited is a person who cannot read? That thought sticks with me every day, having not only a young child myself, but teaching 9 children with special needs. My goal in the 4 years I have each child in class is to, where possible, develop a functional reading vocabulary. Anyone here who knows me, knows I tend to stick to products, and leave my editorializing out of many reviews. Though this topic has always interested me and I have loved much of what I have read here, I never felt motivated enough to put down my thoughts. Until today ... First, I am a teacher of 9 children with special needs, none who know how to read, but all who love stories. In the 4 years I have them, some goals we have are to help them learn to recognize alphabet letters, their names, family names, their address, and if fortunate enough some simple words. Obviously reading plays a part in this, and we have a library of children's books and magazines always available. I try and incorporate stories into lessons we are doing, or just for fun. Many of my students try and "guess" at the plot by looking at the pictures on the page and creating their own dialogues and events. Which got me thinking ... With a group of children who might not become voracious readers, I needed to be more functional in my approach. After much trial and error, I have found a few techniques that have really helped my students come to appreciate books on a more personal level. 1. Books on tape did not work. I thought the kids would love to hear people reading to them and follow along with a book, but most fell asleep or kept drifting off wanting to do other things. What they wanted was my voice, me, reading the pages, asking them questions, interacting. I never brought another book on tape into the room again. 2. I tried letting them create their own books. I have some resources available to me because I work in a school, but really the only tool I use that everyone might not have access to is a book binding machine. In years past, before the school purchased this machine, I would take the books created and punch a whole in the corner and use one of those circle loops to hold the pages together. Stapling the pages or punches 3 wholes and using string or ribbon also works. I started with things they knew and built from there. I used common words and phrases the children could memorize and try to read. We started with address books, and moved on to family books. Where we couldn't find pictures to help show who or what we wanted we looked through magazines to help us. One year we made "feelings" books, and came up with a recurring phrase(" When I feel ______, I know what to do .... ") and related pictures to help the children remember what they chose to write about. This year we are working on food words, and going to try to create a food book, a menu, and a grocery list. 3. I tried changing the words. My students pay attention best to information that relates to them and a key for my class in learning has been to use their first names, and the letters within their name (especially the first letter) to springboard many reading related activities. I have used picture dictionaries and just concentrated on the letters A,B,C,D,I,M,N,V (these are the letters each of their first names start with). Since I did this for the first time last year, my older kids who were in my class last year, they have been able to remember last years lessons. The R and S lessons we did last year- named for the 2 students, both an R and an S name, graduated and went onto a different school. The kids still remembered the lessons and picture cues. This month we read Dr. Seuss's ABC book, a book where each page has a rhyme for each alphabet letter, and only read those pages that coincided with the letters for their first names (see above). I changed a line in the story that says, " Big D, little d, what begins with D?" to "Big D, little d, who begins with D?" The kids would then call out the child's name. They have since asked to look at the book on their own, and often cues each other on their "alphabet name" pages. None of these are ideas I found in books, they all were inspirations while thinking of how to help these specific children learn to read to the best of their individual ability. We have over 200 books in my classroom, and the books my children have enjoyed the most are those that we have "created" something else out of the story - whether it be by an art project, writing lesson, or theme. These books have meaning to my children, because the time was taken to relate the material to something that had relevance to them.  |
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