Before You Turn the Page…Share Your Thinking!

One of my students showing her students how to think about what’s happening in the book!

What a crazy month February was! Long Island had so much snow that schools closed for TWO days. My graduate students who are teaching in the Literacy Clinic this semester lost another day of class because of the snow.

We came back on Monday and everyone - the graduate students and the kids were ready to get back into the routine and get to work — which honestly was so nice to see.

One of my students was conducting an interactive read-aloud with her two first grade students. I sat with her group for a good amount of time to observe how she was implementing the read-aloud and also how the kids were responding to the book. Before turning the page and moving on, the teacher (who is my student) had stopped to share what she was thinking as she was reading to the two first graders. She did this multiple times. When she shared her thinking, she was modeling how she was making sense of the illustrations and the words on the page. She was pointing to the illustrations to explain why she had a particular thought or idea about the book.

I was so glad that I stayed and observed the whole lesson because towards the end of the book, one of the students imitated the teacher when she said, “I’m noticing that the house is pink (she pointed to the pink house in the illustration) and I wouldn’t expect Ms. Swamp to live in a pink house. She was dressed in all black. The pink house doesn’t fit her.”

Just as the teacher was modeling how she was thinking about what she was reading, the student was able to do the same thing. She even used the same language as my student “I’m noticing…”

Helping kids become readers requires more than setting aside time for them to read. It is also what they see and hear the adults in their lives doing when reading with them. We are all wired to imitate — and if you model a behavior enough, kids will imitate it!