In my role as Title I Director I help to oversee our important
work with our students in mathematics and literacy. We spend hours identifying the students who
need interventions, collecting data to help us best serve their needs, and then
assessing their growth based upon these interventions in order to measure our
own success in helping our students learn.
Students are offered strategies for close-reading and
writing and they practice answering questions and searching for context
clues. But what about the pure joy of
reading?
I recently attended a keynote presentation that featured a
topic that mesmerized me. Lester L.
Laminack, Professor Emeritus from Western Carolina University, presented on his
book, The Ultimate Read-Aloud Resource. Professor Laminack shared many ideas
throughout his presentation. He cited
the research. He suggested new
strategies. But the most important thing
that he did for us was sharing a simple story.
He just read-aloud from a picture book to a room filled with teachers.
The story he chose to read was a book entitled In November by Cynthia Rylant and
illustrated by Jill Kastner. Professor
Laminack read us the story, and savored every word. The large auditorium was so quiet that you
could hear the flipping of every page.
It was a wonderful book and an even greater experience. And his point was well-made.
In The Ultimate
Read-Aloud Resource, Laminack (2016) writes:
I hear the demands
to raise scores in our schools. I see
the impact of the pressure to get more done in less time to meet
standards. And I wonder. I wonder what we lose when we let go of those
small moments…will we lose the
intense natural interest children bring to the worlds of their imagination? (p.
19)
With so many concerned with the “fake news” flooding social
media and the picture books written solely to sell toys there has never been a
more important time for us to share the great works of art with our
students. I encourage all parents to
share the experience of reading-aloud with their children. This could be in the form of reading a
picture book at night or even just taking thirty seconds to share a great line
from a novel, movie review, or historical biography.
For the month of December I will be sharing via Twitter some
of the greatest lines from the most amazing stories I have encountered and I
encourage everyone in our school community to do the same. I will use the Twitter hashtag #ReadNR and I hope that we can engage
as a community to share those lines from anything that we are reading aloud to our
children, encountering in our favorite novels, journals, or newspaper
articles. It could be a line from a
picture book or the closing words of a short story. If you are not on Twitter please email me
the line, up to 140 characters, at pdaly@nrpsk12.org
and I’ll be happy to post it for you.
My first tweet is from a story I first read in the third
grade. It’s a book with opening and
closing lines I’ve committed to memory.
It’s a story I read as a child, and again as a young adult, a college
student, a new teacher, and now to my children.
It’s a book that is filled with language that makes me excited about
reading. Here are the final lines of Charlotte’s Web.
“It is not often that someone comes along who is a true
friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both.” - E.B. White #ReadNR
You can follow Dr. Daly on Twitter @nrschools
