The ebb and flow influence of Read Aloud West Virginia is totally dependent on the volunteers willing to sacrifice an hour a week to leverage their personal literacy to support the unimaginably difficult process of motivating struggling, passive children to develop their own reading skills.
I was an elementary principal for 33 years and witnessed amazing teachers practicing a research-based pedagogy designed to produce students capable of decoding words.
The pendulum of strategies was always alternating. We embraced phonics, big books, whole language, story organizers, cloze, word families, basal texts and more.
Each had a proven success record in teaching children to read. Each failed a significant portion of children incapable of converting letters into words, words into phrases and phrases into comprehension.
So, too many of the very young were moved along, forced to apply reading strategies that were beyond their grasp. They began resenting the incessant skill and drill of wall sound cards or the robotic utterance of a phonemic cadence that meant nothing toward satisfying the gaping chasm between what they knew about applying their primitive reading skills with the written words the teachers expected them to translate.
Reading appeared to be an unrealistic goal for them. Students develop understandable reactions:
- “Why bother? I’m too far behind and embarrassed that I am in the yellow bird grouping.”
- “Maybe the teacher is correct. She told my parents that I’m not mature enough, and there was still time to become a student capable of not only learning to read but reading to learn.”
- “I do enjoy the stories that are read to me. I imagine a magic carpet or a grinchlike meanie.”
Children want us to help motivate them to try harder! They want us to help them to overcome a hesitancy to even try to read aloud. They so enjoy hearing you read and learning about the many places, mysteries, humor and intrigue locked inside that book you hold.
Please join the cadre of volunteers whose passion is to find a book worthy of a classroom of the most precocious children mixed among the most disadvantaged readers.
Thank you for reading if you are. Thank you for planning to read if you currently aren’t.
— Steve Knighton retired as the longtime principal of Kanawha County’s Piedmont Elementary School, and is a Read Aloud supporter.