A Piece of it All: Learning to Read, Learning to Belong

from a Reflection Writing Retreat at Shelburne Farms

A Piece of It All: Learning to Read,
Learning to Belong

by Mary Ellen Lovinsky

Mary-Ellen Lovinsky is a Title One Reading and Consulting Teacher in Orleans Southwest Supervisory Onion. She teaches reading and works in classroom teams with first and third grade children at Hardwick Elementary, fourth fifth and sixth grade students at Lakeview Union and consults at Woodbury Elementary School. Her mapping unit was done when she worked as a Title One teacher at Wolcott Elementary School. Mary-Ellen lives with her family in East Hardwick on a small homestead farm. She is part owner of Eastview Enterprises Inc., which manufactures Sylvacurl, a sustainable wood packaging product

I teach children to read to themselves and sometimes I read to children. I connect them to our world through the words on pages in books. I am a district Title One employee. This year I work with children in two elementary schools and four grades. Over the course of my teaching career, I have worked with children who have difficulty learning to read and write and lag behind their peers. I work with classroom teachers to provide a first round of literacy instruction as part of the classroom program and I play supportive roles in a tutorial type setting as well. I spend my days with small groups of students and sometimes in a one-on-one setting helping children to read and connect with books.

Making Connections and Title One
In the summer of 2000, I was fortunate to enroll in a class sponsored by Education for Sustainability and Shelburne Farms called Making Connections. At that time I spent one half of my workday as a Reading Recovery teacher and the other half in a first grade classroom. I taught the skills and process of reading and writing, but I yearned for a way to use books to help children to understand that they were part of this place which we all share together. I hoped to open the world up for these children, to create an understanding that we are all part of something larger than ourselves.

In the Making Connections course there were elementary and high school teachers involved in writing units to address place-based learning and sustainability, using two Vermont Standards from the Framework (4.6 Understanding Place and 3.9 Sustainability) as the basis of our work. One of the books that we used to set up the lessons was Lasting Results by Mark Skelding. We wrote units that used assessment as an integral part of the projects. I was there because it was important to me personally: I felt these standards were essential to anchor children’s learning and experiences in the world in which they live. I believe that children need roots before we give them wings. The place where we live is not an abstract concept. We can touch it and see it, hear, taste and smell this place we call home. At the time I was not aware how this class would affect my future. Somehow I expected to use the ideas I learned about in the class and thread them into the team teaching part of my work day. I was not prepared for the scope and sequence of the project and how this one course could affect my teaching from that point on.

What is Community?

The class project I designed allowed me to combine my professional passions around literacy work with my personal passions around community, the natural world and our place in it. We talked about sustainability issues in discussions about the impacts our actions have both on other people and on the natural world that we are part of. The unit was designed to use a constructivist approach and to address the social studies curriculum areas for new first graders. Children would build meaning to answer the essential question of, “What is Community?” over the course of a month. Authenticity in teaching comes when the teacher lives the lessons herself. I learned with the children and other adults as we developed our own learning community.

The unit was named Country Mouse City Mouse. We learned about ourselves, our school, and our rural town of Wolcott, Vermont and then compared our town to the city community of Burlington. I designed the course of study to extend existing curriculum (which had included units called All About Me and My Family) to incorporate literacy learning, and to open up the world for our first graders. We looked at our human neighbors and built cardboard houses. We mapped the classroom, bedrooms, houses, the school and the town. We explored the town by going to classmate’s and teacher’s houses on a bus tour and then we drove off with parent chaperones on a field trip to the city on Lake Champlain. Most of the children had not been to Burlington. As I recall, even the bus driver hadn’t been there before! Later we looked at more maps of Vermont and the world and talked about our place in it.

I was part of a wonderfully open team that included two new classroom teachers, a teacher of deaf children, and a paraprofessional. My principal was supportive. We had a great time and worked hard on the progression of activities. The children in the classroom were excited and engaged. Each day was an adventure. They pieced together knowledge about their homes as we worked. As our community emerged, we worked out social issues.

When I worked on the unit in the weeks of summer I imagined an exciting way to connect kids to each other and to the world. Books would provide an avenue for travel. In reality, the unit took on a life of its own, it grew with us. Each of the lessons had some connection to literacy. The teachers I worked with added activities and made suggestions and extensions into other subject areas.

I concluded Country Mouse City Mouse with an activity which used this poem by Felica Holman called, “Who Am I?”

Who Am I?

The trees ask me
And the sky
And the sea asks me
Who am I?

The grass asks me
And the sand.
And the rocks ask me
Who am I?

The wind tells me
At nightfall
And the rain tells me
Someone small

Someone small
Someone small
But a piece
of
it
all.

In this poem, a child asks a question that we all continually look for an answer to as we grow. Over time our life experiences help to make us into who we are. We participate and grow in understanding of our place in this world. Books help children to grow and to define their roles.

What is it about community that makes books work?
I continue to incorporate the discussions about the concepts we studied in my other roles and in the other schools where I have worked in Orleans Southwest Supervisory Union. I have found over and over that children really need to discover how they are part of their community to see how they are part of the larger world. What does a child need to develop the connections to build meaning around sustainability questions and an enduring understanding of what constitutes community and place? How can books help to provide that support? What kinds of books help to open doors?

I believe that one way understanding develops is through the dialogue created as we read stories out loud to children and discuss them. Stories take us places. They bring us to the thresholds of new worlds. We enter them together. We ask questions, determine what is important, infer, relate prior knowledge and travel through words to find answers. As we make sense of the books with children we teach them to be metacognitive. We teach them to think about their reading and we teach them to think about the world. We form community as we read and talk.

I expect to teach children thinking strategies to make links to books they read. I know that many children do not know how to make these links on their own. One way to facilitate this process of growth is to model the connections that I make as a reader with read-aloud books. Authors of current literature in the field of comprehension discuss strategies to help children make those links. In the book Mosaic of Thought, the authors Ellin Oliver Keene and Susan Zimmerman discuss teaching comprehension strategies in a reader’s workshop. The authors discuss the connections that we all make as we actively build meaning from text. We make connections between the text and ourselves, between the text and our world, and between the text and other texts. “Modeling is an essential, inestimably important step in helping children observe and then use the mental processes used by proficient readers.” (p.39) I have found that the experiences we have with stories help us all to answer the question that the child in the poem asks, as well as helping us learn to be better readers.

What is it about a book that makes community work?
Some books help to create a learning community while they are being shared
Through modeling, dialogue develops. This helps to create an experience for us. We share the author’s words and this creates special moments in time. We travel to worlds created with visual images and phrases. We wonder together. We laugh and feel and sometimes fret, all the while creating an event as we read. I did this with my own children as we were growing up together. I continue on the journeys each time I read a book with children.
Photo at right: Mapping out the town in the school's gym.

The books that I chose to read to our students over the course of the month-long community unit included elements such as communities, place, systems, cycles, interdependence, limits, diversity and intergenerational themes. When I used these categories as a lens to look at the content in different books, I came to understand how easily some discussions emerge with the right book choice. When questions and discussion become natural outcomes during and after the process of reading a book out loud, the goal of helping kids to find and make abstract connections is easier. The goals of making text-to-self, text-to-world, and text-to-text connections happen in this learning process.

One outcome of my work for me has been the discovery that teachers need more books for emerging readers. Learners need to be able to read themselves to facilitate discussion and questions and to foster growth. Below is a list of book titles that encourage children to explore and understand the world. Some were contributed by other teachers from the Making Connections class. We worked on a list together after the course was finished so that we could continue to share ideas.

As we work in this field together, we can develop literature that is readable for young children and introduces these concepts about place and sustainability. We can teach children how to read and also include content about this place we call home. This will provide opportunities for rich discussions and explorations from the very beginning of literacy learning. These books should not be part of an add-on program, but an integral part of the whole literacy curriculum, helping children to understand and appreciate their home place in the world, so that they can then discover how they fit into the larger scheme of things. Regional books would be a great way to build on place curriculum. Let’s get to work!

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Keene, Ellin, Zimmerman, Susan Mosiac of Thought Teaching Comprehension in a Reader’s Workshop, Heinemann 1997.

Skelding, Mark. Lasting Results A Teacher’s Manual, Common Roots Press, 2000.

GO TO: Children's Literature for Teaching about Sustainability (a matrix)