The following post is part of a Seed Pod collaboration about libraries. Seed Pods are a SmallStack community project designed to help smaller publications lift each other up by publishing and cross-promoting around a common theme. We’re helping each other plant the seeds for growth!
Joey climbs into the white porcelain, claw-footed bathtub just inside the sunny window of his school library and sinks onto the puffy yellow and green pillows that line the bottom.
“Here’s your book,” I say, as I hand him Pete the Cat and the Cool Caterpillar and open it to the title page.
Before I can pull over a chair for myself, he’s pulled off his sneakers, still tied, then tosses them over the edge of the tub. I sigh. We only have fifteen minutes. Getting his shoes back on will cut into our reading time, I think.
I point to the picture inside the front cover that looks like a string of green peas with a smiling face and huge eyes on one end. The peas all have legs. “What’s this?”
“It’s a caterpillar!” Joey says.
I know this is what he’ll say. Joey’s brought this book to our reading time each of the last three weeks. It’s his current favorite book. I suspect it’s his favorite because he knows the story by heart and can “read” it to me without looking at the words. It was the same with Five Little Monkeys Jumping on the Bed last month. I make him slow down and tell me what a line says here and there, but mostly I’m okay with his “telling” instead of reading.
What’s important is that Joey knows I’ll be there every Thursday at the same time, and together we’ll read books and talk about the stories. We laugh at the silly jumping monkeys. We try to predict what will happen next to Dog Man in the book I read to him after he finishes reading his book to me. He loves crawling into the bathtub. The librarian tells me it helps children feel safe and confident in their reading.
After meeting with Joey for several months, I know that he knows most of the words. He just gets caught up in the story and knows he can tell it faster than he can read it. I’m not there to teach him to read, though. The real reason I’m there is because I want Joey to fall in love with books, just like I did when I was his age.
I come from a family of readers. I remember trying to make sense of the words inside books, long before I could read. I pretended to read them, much like Joey does. It was the delight in a good story that drove me then and the same delight I hope will rub off on the students I read with now.
My role as a Literacy Partner at this lower-performing, dual language elementary school is to read with a couple of first or second graders once each week for fifteen minutes each. The students read for a few minutes, then I read to them. That doesn’t seem like much time, but the program I volunteer with has been doing this for fifteen years in sixteen school districts in and around Austin, Texas. They’ve got data. This approach works.
Joey was one of two students I read with last year. This will be my fifth year coordinating the dozen or so volunteers at the same school. In that time, we’ve helped around a hundred students get on track with their reading. Before third grade, students learn to read. After third grade, students read to learn. According to Education Connection’s website, 88% of high school dropouts struggled to read at third grade.
I’m all in with the organization’s mission, and I’m considering going out on a limb this year. Although I don’t speak Spanish, I may take on a Spanish-speaking student. Some of these students have only been in the US for a short time. For others, no one speaks English at home. We only have a few volunteers who speak their language, and too many students who need help. I don’t want any of them to miss out.
Maybe I’ll learn some Spanish in the process. I know it won’t be easy, but I’m looking forward to the challenge.
I took two years of Spanish in high school—a loooong time ago. I think I can recognize words in a first-grade vocabulary well enough to read them or to ask a student to say them. I’m also depending on teachers and the school librarian to help me find dual-language books to read from. Maybe I’ll learn some Spanish in the process. I know it won’t be easy, but I’m looking forward to the challenge. I wonder if there’s a Spanish version of Five Little Monkeys Jumping on the Bed?
At the very least, I hope my students will enjoy our time together as much as I do. Over the past five years, I’ve discovered some great new children’s books, and the kiddos I’ve read with learned they were important enough for me to come and spend time with them each week. Besides, what could be more fun than reading in the library’s bathtub?
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(Cartoon of three green happy peas in a pod on a plain yellow background with a dotted orange border. Black text by the peas reads, "Seed Pods; A SmallStack Community Project”)
Another idea for something to do when I retire! Great story, Janice.
Bathtub reading sounds like such a great idea! Thanks for volunteering and sharing your story :)