Reading Coach Preps Parents

As part of latest push to improve reading in public schools.

“What can I do to push her to be her optimistic self? How can I help her grow?” Acres asked. ​“Just because she’s a kindergartener doesn’t mean she can’t be reading at a second-grade level. I just want her to be the best she can be.”

At L.W. Beecher Museum Inter-District Magnet, an elementary school in Beaver Hills, Acres was in luck.

Once a marking period, Lauren Canalori, the school’s reading coach, invites parents into Beecher’s library for literacy workshops, as part of a system-wide effort to boost reading.

It’s just one part of the Beecher’s efforts that have shown results in their students’ literacy. Over the last three years, the proportion of its students on grade level has increased by half over, jumping from 29.7% in 2016 – 17 to 43.3% in 2018 – 19.

For this most recent workshop, Canalori put out the call to parents with kindergarteners and first-graders for tips on ​“how to support beginning readers.”

Acres’ daughter is currently at Level A, meaning she’s just starting to read books on her own.

Usually, those books have repeated sentence patterns: ​“I can walk,” ​“I can run,” ​“I can kick,” the same formulation on each page.

By the end of kindergarten, she’s expected to reach Level D to stay on grade level. Within just a few months, those straightforward sentences will become more complex, with descriptive adjectives and verb tenses. The words will become multi-syllabic. The stories will include dialogue and the outline of a plot. The pictures become less helpful.

Soon, she should be able to read, ​“The horse went in the little house. ​‘What a nice little house,’ said the horse.”

Canalori said that Acres can use a bunch of strategies that Acresto help her daughter get there.

She suggested an Uno-like game called ​“Zap,” in which kids uncover paper-cutouts of words that they should recognize on sight, because they show up so often in texts. She suggested making tactile versions of words, whether with play-doh, sugar or shaving cream. And she suggested playing sign-spotting games while driving.

Canalori said that, in kindergarten, students should be reading about 12 books a week.

But Canalori added that parents shouldn’t give up on story time. She said they should keep reading to their kids, either by letting them pick out chapter books from the library, or if things get busy, even putting audio books on, as long as they talk about it after.

Acres said she’d noticed her daughter is often uninterested by the Level A books.

“What she’ll do at the end is go back in and say, ​‘This is how I would have written it,’ and she’ll make up the story herself with her imagination,” Acres said.

“These texts are so basic, so we want to continue having our kids hear more complex stories,” Canalori said. ​“Continue to read books to her that she can’t read independently.”

Then, Canalori brought Acres over to a table to show her ​“Our Apartment Building,” an example of the Level A books that her daughter should be reading. The 10-page story uses simple, repetitive sentences: ​“This is our street,” ​“This is our building,” ​“This is our door.”

Canalori said that Acres could show her daughter the book uses the same structure throughout, highlighting the same three words on each page. She said Acres’ daughter could then use ​“picture power” and ​“sound power” of the first letter to figure out the unknown word.

“The Reading Wars”

For decades, academics have debated the right way kids should learn to understand words on the page. The arguments grow heated. They’ve been deemed ​“the reading wars.”

On one side, proponents of ​“whole language” say that children will learn to read almost naturally if they’re surrounded by gripping books by memorizing the look of words. When students don’t know a word, the proponents say, the students should look at entire sentence’s context and figure out what sounds right.

On the other side, advocates of phonics say that children need to be systematically taught the 44 sounds used in the English language. When students don’t know a word, they should break it apart into individual sounds until they recognize a word they’re familiar hearing, in what’s known as ​“phonemic awareness.”

Those two factions reached a detente with ​“balanced literacy.” The approach essentially teaches students both, walking them through the sounds of letters and showing them how to make meaning with other sentence clues.

That’s what’s happening in most of New Haven’s elementary school classrooms, where time is split between explicit phonics instruction and reading and writing workshops.

Despite recent gains, only 34.9% of the district’s lifelong English speakers are reading at the level they should be by third grade. A recent curriculum audit concluded the district should schedule literacy blocks and provide a clearer sequence of skills for phonics and vocabulary.

In a series of recent radio documentaries, the APM Reports journalist Emily Hanford has argued that the compromise of ​“balanced literacy” might be doing kids harm. She argues that the cognitive science lines up behind systematic phonics instruction, as the bulk of the research has shown that proficient readers can figure out each word almost instantaneously without looking for context.

In her latest, At a Loss for Words, Hanford argues reading lessons that encourage students to guess at words — by looking at the pictures, the sentence pattern and the unknown word’s first sound — might discourage students from practicing ​“decoding” the sound of the letters.

For instance, in Our Apartment Building, the Level A book Canalori showed, the very first sentence says, ​“This is our city.” ​“City,” with its soft ​“c” that sounds like an ​“s,” is a word that Acres’ daughter hasn’t been taught to decode yet, which would send her right to the picture.

“The minute you ask them just to pay attention to the first letter or look at the picture, look at the context, you’re drawing their attention away from the very thing that they need to interact with in order for them to read the word [and] remember the word,” David Kilpatrick, a psychology professor at SUNY Cortland, told Hanford.

Acres said that she thought learning to sound words out phonetically, the way she was taught, was the better way to learn. She said her son was taught to memorize lists of ​“sight words,” but now, in sixth grade, he’ll sometimes mix them up. ​“Strategy” becomes ​“started,” she gave as an example.

“He’ll see a word, and because it looks similar to a sight, he’ll just say that. I’ll ask, ​‘Are you looking at it?’ He’ll say, ​‘Yes.’ ​‘So, where did the ​‘b’ come from?’ I tell him to sound the word out, and he gets it immediately,” Acres said. ​“But he’s afraid to sound the word out because he’s embarrassed.”

Canalori said that there’s some sight words that have to be memorized, like ​“the” and ​“was,” whose spellings don’t match how they sound.

It’s Complicated

To be sure, knowing how to sound out a word alone isn’t enough for reading comprehension, as students also need to know what it means.

Canalori said that’s where, at least for kindergarteners and struggling first-graders, pictures come in as a way to help. She told Acres that her daughter should be looking between the words and the pictures, as a way to make the words she’s reading make sense.

“Reading truly is complicated,” she said. ​“There are many strategies we are teaching students, through mini-lessons, to help them lift the print from a page and to make meaning of that print. They are learning that letters correspond to sounds and that sounds blend together to make words. Pictures are there to help them make meaning and solve unknown words.”

Canalori said that it’s normal for pre-schoolers to flip through a book and make up their own story to match the pictures. But she stressed at Tuesday’s workshop that, by kindergarten, they want students to look for ​“one-to-one matching,” meaning that the sentences they speak aloud match the number of words on the page.

Acres said she hadn’t been doing that with her daughter. As Canalori showed her the first page of ​“Our Apartment Building,” she guessed her daughter would have narrated, ​“I’m playing with my friends,” rather than what was on the page: ​“This is our city.” She said she was thinking about buying her daughter a plastic wand, as a Christmas present, to help with pointing at each word.

Across Beecher, teachers have focused on increasing the number of books that kids read, after Canalori said she noticed the students who were behind weren’t keeping up with the expected number of books for their reading level.

Teachers now send kids home with paper-printouts of books at their reading level. They hold grade-wide discussions, right now on Jason Reynolds’ ​“Ghost.” And they compete to see which classroom can read more and be the first to stack up enough finished books to reach their teacher’s height.

“Reading at school isn’t enough,” said Kathy Russell-Beck, Beecher’s principal. ​“For every five weeks that students are not reading at a high volume, they lose a level.”

Only a handful of parents were able to make it to Tuesday morning’s workshop. Knowing how hard it is for working parents to show up for a 9:45 a.m. session, Canalori tries to time others throughout the day. This year, Canalori (and Erin Frank, Beecher’s math coach) are considering putting their lessons online, with short videos that parents can watch on their own time.