I had a sub. teaching job on Monday. The call came on Friday afternoon, and since I did not have anything of major import on my schedule, I committed to going down to the south side and wrangling five year olds as a para-pro. for the day. So I put my frozen dinner in my little lunch box and spent the day in Kindergarten.
As usual, in any given class, there are little people that are much more advanced than the average, and there will also be some that you will quickly discover do not have the readiness skills to be well equipped for the next grade. At any time when they were uncooperative, or prone to general rowdiness, misbehaving, the teacher reminded them they are only about two weeks away from being able to call themselves First graders: 'you know what the rules are' or 'you know what you should be doing' to get them back in line. She was very capable, obviously with much experience and managed them well.
The interesting thing was one little girl who was so advanced compared to her peers. She was using such sophisticated language, I was amazed. There was a point when they were instructed to take out a bag of books they have in their desks and practice reading: this girl was reading on at least the fourth grade level. I got so interested in the book she was reading to me, I had to finish it when they were called to do something else. It was not just the text of the book, it was her word usage in conversation. When she would respond to the teacher's questions, or interacting with classmates - she casually used language some ten year olds would not fully understand.
I had to ask if she and her mom read a lot at home and she said 'yes'. Then she said she had three older sisters. Can't you just envision them going to school all day, and then getting home and 'playing school' in the afternoon? I asked how old she was and she reported she was six, that her birthday is in November, so she could easily be nearly a year older than many of the other students in that class - but I was astounded at the language ability of little Destiny. And hope that she will be in classrooms with teachers who appreciate her remarkable talents, and will make the effort to challenge her to continually aim higher.
I usually notice the ones who are so unprepared to make the step up. They are the ones who are struggling with not being able to figure words out phonetically, have not been able to pick up the concept of sounding the letters out to guess at what the word is, unable to use picture clues to decipher the sentence. And they do not know the little words that are the building blocks to make sentences: the hundreds of 'sight words' teachers have posted on the walls in the class room that have been their spelling words from week to week. They will be having trouble with reading the little books that have a five word sentence on each page. And not able to spell the words correctly as they write in their journals. You wonder what will happen: if they are behind when the teacher sends them on to first grade and they do not have the readiness skills in August, what will happen when they get passed along over the years, and end up in high school barely literate? Drop outs? Burger flipping? Baby-mama or daddy at fifteen?
No comments:
Post a Comment