Within the first few moments of summer school, I knew she could be a handful. She ruled over the small classroom, telling students where to sit and all but claiming another girl as her personal devotee. She talked when she should be listening; she rolled her eyes when we started anything academic and she did everything she could to avoid doing any actual work.
Our summer program was designed around experience and exploration – building imagination, background knowledge, vocabulary and a foundation of fun we hoped would help students get excited about school and learning again after all they have been through in the past eighteen months. We were knee-deep in streams catching crawfish and water striders; we built primitive lean-to’s in the woods for shelter; we learned how to use binoculars to see wildlife up close and personal. Of course we also read together and on our own; practiced math facts and math strategies and wrote something almost every day.
My “diva” as I internally nicknamed her, was here to socialize beyond anything else. She was the boss of the lean-to builders; the coordinator of lunch seating arrangements and the first one to mutter objections to any structured learning we might do.
It only took me a day or two to realize she wasn’t reading aloud with the rest of us when we chorally read our daily story together. I made a point on the second day to sit with her during independent reading and listen to her read one-on-one. And here is where her confidence and larger-than-life personality took a nosedive. My “diva” was a struggling reader. She guessed at words far more often than read them and would as likely read “cantaloupe” or “can opener” for “canopy”. When she tried to decode a word (at my urging) she had no order to her sounds and often skipped ahead and jumbled up the word as she worked it through, leaving her more confused and frustrated than when she started. The books she had chosen for her book bin were much too difficult for her, and while she could get larger, more complex words off the page, like “assembled” and “section”, smaller words often baffled her. Part way through reading, she looked at me and said, “I hate reading.” I had no doubt.
The first thing I did was to compliment her on how hard she was trying to read the book she had in her hand. I commended her, saying, “I don’t know if I could stick with a book that was so hard for me. I find it too frustrating and it doesn’t make me want to read the book but you are really trying so hard to figure out the words, at least while I am sitting here.” She looked completely confused. I suggested maybe she find a book that she could read much easier. She confidently told me she had looked through all of my books and hadn’t found any. With nearly two thousand books in my classroom library, I knew this wasn’t the case, so I made a couple of suggestions and reminded her that lunch time was perfect time to swap out books and I left it at that. At lunch I saw her in the library section of the classroom filling her bin with some of my suggestions.
Later that day, during our outdoor activity, we were in the woods drawing what creatures might live in the wetlands we were looking at, when our instructor used the word “canopy” to describe the trees overhead. She was sitting a short distance away from me but I eagerly jumped in and said, “That’s [Diva’s] new word! She just learned that this morning!” She turned and looked at me and smiled, enjoying the spotlight, only this time it was shining on her for her success during reading, her least favorite subject.
The next day I made a point to sit with her and listen again. This time she had four much more appropriate books in her bin and had started on one of them. As I sat with her I said, “Oh, Ivy and Bean! What a great choice for you! I think you will enjoy reading this book so much more than the one from yesterday!” She was still very skeptical but she read for me nonetheless.
This time, as she read, she was able to get a little more flow into her sentences. She still stumbled regularly, and I could see that old coping habits were impeding her fluency, as she guessed words and kept reading on despite them making no sense at all. But as I sat with her and complimented her attempts and every now and then gave her a nudge to help her get a word off the page, I could visibly watch her confidence grow. She sat up straighter in her chair. She put her finger under the words to help her stay with the flow of the sentence. She went back and reread a sentence after figuring out a challenging word to better understand the overall meaning. I praised and praised and pointed out explicitly the reading strategies I saw her using. “I love how you went back and reread that!” “Great job realizing the Magic E was helping that vowel!” “I noticed you didn’t just blow over that hard word but you took it head on and worked it out even though it took you several tries!”
On the fourth day of camp, after making my rounds listening to other readers, when I announced it was time to put books away, she groaned and made a frustrated face. I couldn’t help it, I started laughing. I announced to the class that we must have had some sort of seismic shift while we read today because [Diva] didn’t want to STOP reading!! Everyone laughed and cheered and once again, she was in the spotlight, but this time earning the attention for her academic success. I hope the joy she felt reading today helps to start the embers of a fire for learning that she might not have imagined before!
Teaching at 3am 