Reading or Writing?
For as long as children have been learning their ABCs and had basal readers shoved in their faces as their gateway to literacy, learning to read has been a problem. Together with great doses of Fonix to off-set the apparent madness of "Look and Guess" or "Have a Try" and hundreds more Learning to Read Programs we can be sure of one thing only. About one in five of our five to six year olds will battle to succeed. We then remediate the losers, have special reading experts take them for remediation, test their eyes and ears, both important, and try again. The Minister intervenes and conducts a massive rescue mission through the research of reading experts, selecting the Reading Guru of the Day who has had the most influence at promoting her research. The media is briefed, all the curriculum masters are given their marching orders and the message is quickly adopted across the nation, with increased funding, or not, to ensure success, this time surely! It may drive the kids to distraction and the teachers to drink but this time everyone will learn to read, or else!. Are you bamboozled by all of the reading strategies and programs that one is quite right in labelling "The Reading Wars" which should have been put to rest? I am too but they have flared up all over again, this time with Ministerial Directives, and you can't get much stronger than that.
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The solution is quite simple, almost 99% successful, that sneaky 1% being there just in case. Ban kids from reading. Ban the teaching of reading. Just do it, from their very first day at school, just ban it. Tell stories and read stories, play with stories and have children tell stories, act our stories, make up stories and love stories. Funny stories and sad stories, scary stories and wise stories; all of Aesops Fables, nursery rhymes and poems, folk tales from all over the world. Tell and talk about many stories every day, with words and sounds bulging out of every nook and cranny in your classroom. Have talkfests and sing words, sing ditties, make up ditties, sing and recite and tell tall tales, and short tails too. Doggy jokes are fun! Have classrooms smothered in alphabets and word banks and silly sentences that kids make up as stories evolve.
The inclusion of grammar and spelling and punctuation, and all the literacy conventions, go hand in hand with all of the word building and vocabulary charts and lists as they grow and grow and grow. Word charts on the ceiling, under chairs, all created by the class of non-readers. Talk about all the words that make you happy, sad, brave, stupid. Write them up and have competitions to see who can find even more. Categorise the words into word families - all the 'ought' words in the one place and so on. Saturate the place with pictures and words and sentences and discuss them all as the children search them out, but ban reading. Tell them that reading is a disgustingly dangerous activity that might corrupt their minds. And all the time encourage in ten thousand ways their creative vocabularies; show them how to argue successfully; listen intently to their growth in using words, and get ready to make your move, when each child is ready, individually, not the whole twenty three all at the same time. Adam might be ready for the invitation, so might Jenny and Robin, but Robert still has a lot of vocabulary use and confidence yet to build. That's fine . He'll be ready when he's ready. Being an author is not the same for everyone, that's National Curriculum thinking.
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Meanwhile every day have every child do handwriting, a "Copy Book" style exercise, for finger manipulation and muscle strength, both necessary for a very special purpose, when they are ready. Yes you are way ahead of me. After hundreds of story telling sessions where children must be given time to tell their own versions of the stories or make up their own unique stories they are invited, when they are ready and only when they are ready, to take pen to paper, crayons and paint brushes and write and illustrate their own story. This writing is not to get a mark out of ten or have red corrections all over it, fix them up and move on. It's a first draft of an author's book, a true blue Junior Aussie Author. The piece will be worked on over many sessions, refined, rebuilt, redesigned and when ready, wait for it, wait for it , drum roll...........Yes published. Published with a proper cover, like a real book, with a proper spine not a string of lousy staples. Printed out with the chosen script and illustrations on your computer printer. At least two copies always, one for the class library, a proper little library in its proper bookcase and the other for the family and Grandma and Grandad. Well I suppose you might relent and let the author read his book to the class at that point, but don't teach reading. It is a subversive activity which might warp the minds of unsuspecting mere mortals.
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Impossible you say? Well if you have never tried it how can you know? One thing though for sure is if you ban reading and foster the writing of a published book in a Multiage Classroom environment that other 1% success is almost 100% assured. I can definitely tell you that it will never work with twenty three same aged learners all publishing their books at the same time. By their sixth year of primary school most children will have published at least twelve books and some would have won literary prizes. They would all be proficient readers, the very thing you least wanted, for you had banned it from day one.
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