Crawling Comes First!
From the desk of Kris…
The Common Core Standards have set the bar pretty high for Kindergarten. We know that at the beginning of the year, many Kindergartners cannot read. While that may be true, it does not mean that they can’t understand text or are unable to answer questions about text. As teachers, we need to teach students ‘how to read’ before they actually ‘know how to read’. The first three Common Core Standards state that Kindergarten students should be able to:
1) With prompting and support, ask and answer questions about key details in a text.
2) With prompting and support, retell familiar stories, including key details.
3) With prompting and support, identify characters, settings, and major events in the story.
Nowhere does it say, “Don’t put your students into a book until they know all of the letter sounds or can differentiate between a digraph and a blend.” For the record, I didn’t know what a digraph was until I started teaching. And believe it or not, I can read. So how can we support the Common Core Standards with our Kindergarteners?
TIME
Every day there should be time set aside for meaningful read-alouds and shared reading so you can begin to familiarize students with the concepts of reading and structures of texts. You can teach them about the characters, setting and key events. They CAN talk to you about text and usually have much insight. Right there you are hitting the first three standards of the common core. Every day! In addition you are teaching them ‘how to read’ before they can actually read.
GROUPS
Go ahead and start pulling reading groups. Standard 10 states: Actively engage in group reading activities with purpose and understanding. True, your students may not be reading yet, but they can learn how to hold a book, how to turn the pages, learn where and what the title is, begin to differentiate between letters and words, and begin to understand that the words form a story and usually match the pictures. These are pre-reading behaviors and are so important to the process.
The reading process for children is like learning how to walk for a baby. You don’t just sit the baby down and show him/her time and time again how to walk. “Now watch how I walk across the floor. Watch again. Now when you think you have watched enough and know everything about the walking process and all of the mechanics that go with it, you will be allowed to walk.” That is NOT what we do. I know it sounds silly, but this is what we sometimes ask our Kindergarteners to do in Reading. When we are teaching a child how to walk we stand the baby up and guide him through the process. We do this even before we know he will actually be able to walk. He wants to stand and try anyway! Then later he ‘teetters’ and ‘totters’ and falls. But what does he do? He gets up and tries again! That is how the reading process should go as well.
CONFER
When we sit students down at a reading group in Kindergarten we know they aren’t going to read Tolstoy just as we know that when our one year old wants to walk he is not going to run a marathon the next day. But students CAN begin to read simple sight words and words that have picture support. You can converse WITH them about the content of the book. They won’t know all of the mechanics of long letter sounds or what a ‘schwa’ is (I don’t even know that), but they will amaze you with what they can do. The smiles that light their faces when they realize they can make sense of a text are heartwarming. This kind of success will inspire them to read more and more.
Don’t be overwhelmed by what they don’t know or what they will need to learn this year. Celebrate what they can do and move on from there. Immerse them in reading and literature every day, several times a day. And practice, practice, practice. I promise you, they will learn how to read! Don’t forget–you have to crawl before you walk!