As you may know, I am teaching two classes of struggling readers. Many of them are at a third grade reading level. The book we were reading, Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, is a fifth or sixth grade level book, but most of the class struggled to decode several words on each page. My dilemna is whether to assign any reading for homework. My instinct is to do all of the reading as a class -- this way, we can discuss the book as we encounter the difficult passages. However, reading the book in this way is so slow. Our classes are only an hour and ten minutes. It takes about that long to get through about ten pages, on a good day. With so much in-class reading, it is then difficult to do any engaging activities in class. In addition, it takes forever to get through the book. By the time we get into the book, many students are tired of it.
I have assigned reading a couple times, but most of the class did not complete the reading. The next day in class, only two students responded to the reviewquestions. One of those students had read the book in middle school and was answering from memory; the other student did the reading for homework. Since no one did the homework, the lesson flopped.
Toward the end of last quarter, with five chapters left to go, I broke the class into five small cooperative groups to complete a final project. Each group was assigned to cover one chapter we read as a class, and one chapter we had not read. The groups were responsible for reading the chapter on their own. Many of the students did the reading, but there were still at least five or six that did not do the reading, and depended on their classmates to summarize the plot for them.
I realize that they are struggling readers, and that reading may not be enjoyable for them, but how do I get them to read on their own so that we can do more interesting things in class? Should I be trying to do this, or should I just be focusing on reading in class, and let the other English teachers do the engaging activities?
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2 comments:
I completely empathize with your plight. On the one hand, you do not want to scale things down so far that your students feel like their being treated like babies, but;on the other hand, you want to create a learning environment that is conducive to the skill set of your class.
As far as homework goes, it seems like this issue in your class is not specific to assigned readings alone. Starting there, though, assigning reading is producing more headaches than anything at this point. I would consider shelfing it for the time being. Remember, you should not be working harder than your students for them to pass.(that's a little bit of my master-teachers wisdom, and I think it's basically sound) Apart from the skill of meeting deadlines which is a crucial life skill, maybe the homework issue needs to be revisited again.
As far as reading goes, I too struggle with this in my seventh grade class. I would approach this text--or any for that matter-- by trying to decide what the skills are that you feel they need. For example, can they get the main conflict or struggle of the book by reading excerpts? Can you approach issues of language, style, theme by skipping parts of the book;instead focusing on scaffolding of erading comprehension skills. These thoughts may or may not be helpful; I hope they are. Ultimately, I think the main idea is that we have to construct our class according to the needs of our students. This is difficult to do under the constraints of standards, tests, ect... You can combine scaled down reading with fun activities. I don't think those ideas are mutually exclusive. If it is basic skills that you are working on then maybe things like reading every page of a novel don't apply.
Again, I am sure you are doing a great job and are trying to reach your students any way you can. As always, hang in there and soon enough you will have your on class from start to finish , and these issues will hopefully lessen with intensity as time goes by. Well, that's enough of my ungrammatically sound, stream of consc. rant. Good luck with the rest of your week.
I LOVED THIS BLOG. i am blog hopping tonight and bumped into this poem. It is disturbingly true.
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