Books in Boys’ Hands
By Karen Davis
Picture a hot, sunny day in June. School has just let out for the summer and students have scattered far and wide to start their vacations. And the teachers? We are all gathered around a conference table, surrounded by fresh, new materials, eagerly planning and prepping for the start of the next school year, even before the memories of the last one have fully faded. It is the cyclical nature of schooling that provides a sparkly new start each year, and a clear opportunity to take a good look at the ways we have been teaching, all with an eye toward improvement. Such was the case this past June for the Lower School reading teachers at Saint David’ s.
In the presentations and subsequent discussions around the conference table that week, what emerged was a recommitment to reading instruction that sought to achieve a more delicate balance. Research has shown the importance of teaching a specific set of reading skills focused on phonemic awareness, print concepts, high frequency words, phonics instruction, fluency, and vocabulary development, all of which build on each other to increase a student’ s overall reading comprehension. And because“ the more children read, the better readers they become,” 1 we also focused our reading instruction in order to optimize the time spent with books in boys’ hands.
Starting in the youngest of grades, boys are taught how discrete sounds( phonemes) make up each word and that by manipulating sounds, different words can be created. In addition,
“ Teaching speech sounds explicitly and directly also accelerates learning of the alphabetic code.” 2 As an emerging reader, this helps students understand how sounds, and therefore words, can be put together, letter by letter. If a student can easily manipulate sounds orally, then there is a correlation between that skill and understanding the same patterns when the words are on paper. Additionally, students are taught distinct decoding and encoding skills to increase reading fluency and spelling skill by scaffolding lessons in a logical order that builds from single letters, to syllables, to word patterns, to multi-syllable words, and then to phrases and sentences. The ultimate goal is to teach boys to be independent when they encounter unseen words or letter combinations. Therefore, teachers present certain parts of their lessons with decodable text(“ phrases, sentences and stories that contain only sounds and words that have already been learned” 3). This approach builds self-esteem and reading success by giving the boys logical rules to follow in the new texts they read.
In addition to learning how to manipulate sounds and words, orally and in print, students in the Lower School are also immersed in word study in our reading classes. Because“ High-frequency words are the most commonly used words in printed text and over 50 percent of all text is composed of them,” 4 students increase their reading readiness and feel more confident when they memorize these frequently used w o r d s. E a c h grade level in the Lower School has a specific set to work with and master, and each boy
22 • Saint David’ s Magazine