Horrakapotchkin! Dag Nab It! Kapow!

 

Kia ora!

Glad I’ve got your attention. Apparently, all blogs are meant to have catchy titles. I am a teacher and I am a learner, so this blog is about both those things.

I am learning to blog and I am learning to advocate for a change to Structured Literacy teaching in schools throughout New Zealand Aotearoa.

There are wiser people out there with good definitions on Structured Literacy (SL), so I’ll put in a link for you here.

Older kiwi teachers like me will instantly recognise the Margaret Mahy homage in my title (and a bit of Batman cartoon viewing time, too.)

Let me be clear. I love good literature. I can spend hours immersed in a novel or a long-form news journal. 

Some people say teaching reading is about creating a love of reading. Well, I beg to differ. I just want to start with getting kids to love coming to school.  

I want them to come to school because they can start to learn to read, not get made to feel dumb because “it’s too hard”.

Case in point, let’s call him Tim. He is in Year 4 and nearly 9-years old. For the first few years of school, he would hide under tables on arrival.  After a while, Tim would start playing with other students, but he would rarely speak to adults. 

During guided reading, when I was his classroom teacher, he would finger point and answer comprehension questions. But he would never read aloud and I could not get him to complete assessment tasks. He was stuck at Yellow/Blue reading levels.

Tim, as you can guess, had a troubled family background and suffered from anxiety. But because he was rarely at school, he was never put forward for the traditional interventions available through the Ministry of Education (MoE).

So I worked to build up Tim’s trust and his oral communication. I did lots of scaffolding to reduce his stress when engaging with tasks across the curriculum.

This year I am his Tier 2 intervention teacher and he has a classroom teacher also beginning her SL journey like me. Together we have had a breakthrough.

For the first time, I have been able to begin assessing Tim. (I used parts of the free Little Learners Love Literacy screening tools). I began instructing him with sorting sound/letter picture cards with a buddy for support, then we moved onto practising handwriting letter shapes. 

Next it was recording sounds/letters on whiteboards. Earlier this year Tim declared “I can’t read!” but we persevered gently.  Later, he began writing CVC words and reading them back to us.

Through my guidance, Tim’s teacher started using SPELD SA free phonics passages with her target students. Now she has started incorporating the new Ready to Read phonics books from the MoE, too.

(Our school has not formally approved the SL approach, so we are working on a shoe-string budget. We have no other decodable books, apart from a few Letters and Sounds readers and some digital downloads, such as Really Great Reading passages. However, the biggest difference for Tim has come from increased teacher knowledge, not ‘things’.)

Now, when I go to collect Tim for his small group lesson with me, he leaps out of his chair to come to do his work. Tim is reading! 

And the powerful effect this is having on Tim is heart warming to see. But I wish I had had these tools when I first was responsible for teaching him 18 months ago. 

I don’t care whether Tim goes on to read Whale Rider by Witi Ihimaera  or all the books in The Harry Potter series.

But I do care whether Tim  learns to read and write so that he can engage in all aspects of his education.

I do care whether he has the skills to write a birthday card to his baby brother, read a shopping list, follow the instructions to play a game, apply for a job, open a bank account, enrol to vote, and write a post on his preferred social media site. You get the picture.

I do not think SL is about turning us all into avid readers, just as when we practise soccer skills at school, not all of us are going to join a pro soccer team as adults.

But being literate and numerate is a basic human right in a modern society. I want that for all my learners, so they aren’t excluded from living what most of us experience, a regular life.

And while I can’t change Tim’s present home life, I can make his time at school a positive and life-affirming experience. 

Nga mihi,

Miss Anon

Footnote: Be sure to read my future post about the value of reading  high quality children’s books in a Structured Literacy approach, to build your learners’ vocabulary and comprehension skills, and their understanding of the wider world.

Structured Literacy is not a ‘this OR that’ approach with phonics instead of rich literature experiences, as some critics claim. SL is an ‘AND AND’ approach. Who doesn’t want to give their learners the best of both worlds! 

But it starts with explicit direct instruction (EDI) in foundation skills, as happened for Tim, with oral language skills and phonics skills, step by step.