Inspiring reluctant readers in the classroom
I’ve written previously about helping reluctant readers and last month a local school asked if I could help out with their own set of unwilling literacy students.
They told me they had a particular problem with some of their boys in the 7 to 9 age group.
They needed inspiring.
Despite my reservations about returning to the classroom, and also doubting my ability to have a positive impact on them in that environment, I felt it was almost my duty to answer their call for help.
Since leaving fulltime education I have only been back into schools for playgroups when my child was a pre-schooler and thereafter for parent consultations, school performances and fairs.
I have played chaperone on a few school trips, and a couple of years ago I went into my son’s school to tell the children about a charity walk I made along Hadrian’s Wall so had a tiny insight of what to expect.
Still, the idea of trying to engage with a 30 strong group of Key Stage 2 children, and thus attempt to get them more engaged with literacy was a shade more than daunting.
However, armed with some guidance from friends and folks of the Internet, I set off for my morning at the school.
My idea was to try and convince children, that although literacy is hard work – for some – that the rewards are enormous and virtually limitless.
I started by asking if they enjoyed literacy, and before giving them enough time to answer explained that it wasn’t really something I enjoyed at school.
It wasn’t until I discovered that it’s what you are writing and reading about that creates any interest that my love of language developed.
And that’s what I tried to practically convey in the next 60 minutes or so. I showed them examples of my writing, specifically that I’ve done reviewing books, toys and days out.
Then I gave each group of children some toys – most of which I’d been sent to review – and asked them to write about them.
Imagine someone who’d never seen these things before, a parent perhaps, and then write an explanation of these toys for them.
What were they?
How had they been made?
What could you do with them?
What improvements would you suggest?
I levelled the playing field for them too. Expressing that spelling and grammar (in this exercise) was not important, and it was more the language they used and how they expressed themselves and the toys in front of them.
Hopefully so they knew that it wasn’t necessarily the ‘best’ at literacy who was automatically going to come up with work trumping everyone else.
Many seemed to get it, and some of the specific children I was targeting really engaged with trying to put into words how they would describe the toys.
I hope they could see that by working hard in their future literacy lessons that this would be a process they would find easier.
Introducing a bit of healthy competition, specifically with those reluctant boys in mind, I awarded one of their children for their excellent work with a prize.
The prize being a Tidy Books Cabin Puzzle.
But all the children were brilliant, as was my experience of spending time with them on this subject, one that I feel passionately about.
That said I’m not in a rush to repeat this process and don’t envy those in the teaching profession.
Yet I comforted myself in the belief that I made one teacher’s job a tiny bit easier, if only for an hour!
If you’ve volunteered to help out at your children’s school, what’s been your experience? If it’s something you’ve not done before, is it something you’d consider? Are you a teacher? What do you think about parents volunteering in the classroom?
You can read more about one scheme to get volunteers into classrooms in London, sponsored by the London Evening Standard through Volunteer Reading Help which operates throughout the UK. If your young reader and writer is in need of inspiration, you could visit the Ministry of Stories which is inspired by Dave Eggers Pirate Store in the US
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