My most favorite part of the day (or to put it in first grade vernacular, my bestest most favoritist) is around 9:45 in the morning, when we do our daily sight word search in the Bismarck Tribune. The morning bell rings at 8:30, we turn in last night’s homework, fill the library book return basket, say the pledge, listen for morning announcements over the loudspeaker (softspeaker in our room. It should be cranked up to about 120 decibels in order to be heard over seven just-ate Fruit-Loops first graders). The official school schedule calls that time a “soft landing.” Soft my eye! It’s more like bungee jumping with a 50 ft. cord off a 40 ft. bridge. It’s hard and fast, and sister…you better be awake and ready to go! We march around our table to our “Get Ready” song that incorporates Brain Gym, and we do any corrections from the previous day.
When all of that is taken care of for the day, I send “Snack Security” to the lunchroom for our morning snack milk cartons. My philosophy on between-meals eating is, how can I possibly know when a child is hungry? I do not share hunger impulses with each student. Some have been up for a short time (the kids who live in town), but others have been up for hours already. Bus rides can take as along as an hour-and-a-half. So this is what we do in our class. They are allowed to grab their snack from home and eat it anytime between arrival and 10:30 a.m. We eat lunch at 11:30, so I will cut them off at least an hour beforehand. I keep a dorm sized frig in our room, so if they bring something perishable, it can be safely stored until they are ready to eat. It also encourages healthy snacks like yogurt and cheeses. Because the atmosphere of learning for us is pretty relaxed, they are allowed to eat while they work on other things. Yes, I sometimes find a smudge of something on a math paper, but really, what does it matter? I feel better knowing they are getting some brain energy at the outset of the day.
That’s all well and good, but that’s not my favorite part. It’s yet to come. When we are settled, each one grabs a newspaper off the stack and a highlighter, and finds a place on the floor to get down to business searching for the sight word of the day. Today our word was “all.” I know I have written about this activity before, but I am just so jazzed about how this simple daily activity is rocking their reading comprehension. Watching them hunched over their newspaper is a smile generator, to be sure. But the VERY BEST part, the BEST OF THE BEST part is hearing them get excited about words they recognize and can read without prompting. This daily routine is working because they are picking words they can decode out of hundreds of words (in small print) on a single page.
I wish I could string words together artistically enough to give you an adequate impression of what their joyous shout-outs sound like. “I FOUND SOLUTION!” (one of this week’s vocabulary words). “I FOUND COWBOY!” “I FOUND THE WEATHER!” “I FOUND ….” This goes on for the full ten minutes I allot for this activity. They are making text-to-text and text-to-world connections, and every time it happens….every SINGLE time it happens, they are more empowered in their reading skills. Do you understand what it really means when a child can read well? Do you get it? It means they are a step closer to doing WHATEVER they want in this life. A child that is a good and fluent reader can go anywhere and do anything his or her little heart desires. It means their future is limitless. It means there is no ceiling on potential. Am I overstating it? Nope.
So when I see that stack of freshly printed and folded newspapers sitting on the table in the staff work room first thing in the morning, modestly priced at 75 cents a piece, I know that my budding readers are going to learn something today about their neighborhood and their state and their world at-large that they didn’t know yesterday. And I know that new words will jump off the page at them today. Words that they may not have noticed yesterday. And I know that while they are searching for names they recognize in the Obituaries (they have no clue what the Obits are, they just know there are LOTS of names on that page), they will find words familiar to them like ‘Mom’ and ‘Sister.’ We can look at color pictures of an oil well in the western part of the state and launch a discussion of our states’ modern day oil rush and dissect the term “boom town.”
And I have a good laugh inside because they are completely unaware that they are LEARNING. Tricky, tricky Mrs. Dahl….
This morning as their voices rose in pitch and fervor and they competed to find the most unusual word possible, I opened the door to the classroom and walked over to our dear Foster Grandmother sitting at her desk in the hallway and said to her, “Listen. Do you hear that?” She listened thoughtfully but looked puzzled. I smiled broadly. “That is the most beautiful sound in the world. That is what discovery sounds like!” She broke into a grin as understanding dawned. “You’re right,” she agreed. “That is a beautiful sound.”
When these kids grow up to do great things, just remember that it all began in the Obituaries...
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