The Road Home: Celebrating Children Reading Independently

“We are what we’ve learned to be and we care about what we’ve learned to care about and we do what we’ve learned to do. So when we see instances of violence or injustice…these are all products of how we’ve been shaped, programmed to think and care and learn and act…A family is a huge learning system that shape us so significantly."   Elizabeth Dozois

This is the 30th and final blog post entry of the 2019-20 school year. Last blog entry, I reflected on how my understandings of 'home reading' have changed in the face of school closures, and the transfer of learning to read from being a primary responsibility of schools to a parental responsibility necessitated by the pandemic lockdown. Today's blog entry offers insights into developing joy in reading at home with children and includes some suggestions for summer reading that are long-time favourites of me, my family and some of the students I have encountered and been privileged to read beside and with over my 30-year teaching career. Thirty blog posts in my 30th year of teaching - that is pure coincidence yet highly serendipitous!

Becoming a reader who builds relationships with and inside texts, who loves to be immersed in the story and has great trouble setting the book aside in favour of a good night's sleep - these are the goals I aspire to for every reader in my life circle!

I've been generally content as a teacher for many years to assume the role of teachers and schools is to offer technical support in the learning to read process, striving in my professional role to enhance my own awareness of how to best teach technical reading skills successfully to young learners. Accepting this role has also allowed me to vaguely assume teachers and parents are also working somewhat in tandem to share the joy of reading as well. As I have travelled the pandemic journey in much closer proximity to families than ever before in my career, it has become clear to me that somehow the balance of this relationship has tilted somewhere in the past couple of decades until most families now perceive the role of schools to be the 'teacher' of reading altogether. More importantly, I believe we have, as educators, inadvertently promoted this thinking by turning reading at home into 'home reading', a trackable, levelled experience whose importance has become unintentionally attached to technical reading expertise rather than the enjoyment and risk once associated with cracking open a new book full of different ideas and challenging words.

As I move forward into the next school year, I am determined to try and re-shape the purposes and procedures associated with home reading. To celebrate the joy and challenge of reading at home as a non-technical experience, an opportunity to try new strategies, find new words, sample new genres, explore new vistas without worry over technical success or teacher 'approval' - either implied or directly applied. To acknowledge the joy of reading happens at home as well as in school, as does the technical practice and improvement of reading overall.

It is truly a joy for me to be jolted into recognizing reading at home for enjoyment, to pique curiosity, to learn a new skill, to share new ideas is exactly what we should be celebrating most! It has nudged me into remembering myself as a childhood reader and the excitement I would feel every Saturday morning coming home from the library with a new armload of 'good reads'.  I have also reflected on my own children as readers, how each of the five of them made known their individual adventures in reading through the stories told around the dinner table, the posters they pinned to their bedroom walls, the books they chose to share as birthday gifts for friends, the excitement of lining up at the bookstore for the midnight launch of the latest "Harry Potter" novel, the negotiating for space in suitcases for both favourite titles and their latest 'new reads' as we packed for summer vacations. These are the true milestones of being a successful, joyous reader - those that bring us pleasure whether we can identify the phonological elements, decode fluently, infer, question or summarize like everyone else in our 'grade or age group'.  In writing about home reading, I have come to recognize the experiences of learning to read has come full circle and returned 'home' - where being technically correct is only one small part of reading independently.

I am so grateful to have had the opportunity to write 30 blog entries this past school year - coincidentally my 30th year as a teacher :)  To have written and responded to queries and situations from students and parents that questioned, guided and celebrated the work of children as readers. It is an extraordinary experience to have your thinking reversed and tumbled unexpectedly - it is even more extraordinary to begin to reflect on your own personal experiences and recognize the importance of memory and experience as a lens for understanding the world of young learners too. 

As a close to this 30th blog of this unusual school year, I would like to honour the remarkable celebration of children enjoying reading independently by recommending a few familiar favourite titles, as well as some newer ones that might prove to be most enjoyable for our students reading at home this summer. A beach is not necessary for a 'beach read' to be loved by both adults and children (although it certainly helps!) this summer - the best part of being a reader is indulging in the time and space to celebrate a brand new story!

Happy Summer to all our families - hope you are all safe and healthy through the coming weeks of summer and I look so forward to welcoming everyone back to school in September - for real!


Lorraine Kinsman, Principal


Recommendations for Summer 'Beach Reads' or Read Alouds 
1. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone by J.K. Rowling (or any of the 'Harry Potter' titles)
2. Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery (my personal favourite!)
3. The Hobbit  by J.R.R. Tolkien
4. The Magic Tree House by Mary Pope Osborne
5. National Geographic Little Kids First Big Book of the World by Karen de Seve
6. Camp Tiger  by Susan Choi
7. How to Be An Explorer of the World: Portable Museum  by Keri Smith
8. How to Be a Good Creature: A Memoir in Thirteen Animals by Sy Montgomery 
9. Clarence's Big Secret by Roy MacGregor
10.  Everybody's Different on Everybody Street by Sheree Fitch

What I Have Learned About Home Reading Through This Pandemic School Closure

"Our online reporting systems, as amazing as they are, have one key limitation. They can’t think. Now more than ever we require teacher professional judgment to mediate whatever limited evidence they are able to obtain about what students know and can do. Professional judgment is so important that it is even listed within the TQS. Now is the time to highlight its value..."  - Alberta Assessment Consortium, April 21, 2020

This is the 29th blog post entry of the 2019-20 school year. Last blog entry we explored the roles of Peace Education and reading as pro-active, critically important elements for raising children with a clear sense of both social justice and compassion. Today's blog entry is written as I contemplate how my understandings of 'home reading' have changed in the face of school closures, and the transfer of learning to read from being a primary responsibility of schools to a parental responsibility necessitated by the pandemic lockdown. It has been a tremendous learning curve for all of us!

A little background information...
For about 25 years, I have laboured under the perception that 'home reading' is a strategy teachers use to encourage families to have their children read at home daily, particularly in the elementary grades, to gain practice time for reading when there are not enough minutes  throughout the school day for independent reading.  When 'home reading' first began emerging on the teaching landscape it was intended mostly as a support for new, young readers just beginning their learning to read journey. At the time I taught grades 5/6 and could certainly see the merits of practicing new reading strategies at home; before long, 'home reading' had become an engrained practice for most elementary school teachers since all of us were grappling with bloated curricula and the challenges of juggling instruction with independent practice. 

I recommended, as did most of my elementary colleagues, that children read at home for 20 - 25 minutes per day to reinforce reading skills and strategies learned at school. As part of that recommendation, when I first introduced this expectation for my students and their families, a recording sheet for practice times that needed to be signed by a parent was part of the expectation. Within a couple of years, this expectation had morphed into brief, written student summaries; eventually I removed the expectation for parents to supervise reading completely as students gained more confidence in themselves as readers and read willingly without parental supervision - at least, most of the time. I recalled when I was a young reader myself I read willingly at home without any parental oversight, just because I loved to read - and developing readers who loved books became my primary goal as a literacy teacher. 

 Although my perspective on parental supervision with older readers changed as a result of these experiences, I continued to support teachers of our youngest students with their home reading programs that typically required parental supervision, mostly because young children may not yet have established strong relationships with books and reading they would be anxious to sustain. Children need practice time to develop and hone reading skills; curricula continues to be jammed with concepts to be taught that leave little time for practicing reading in school, even with the best of intentions and organized planning. And this is pretty much where my mindset resided when the pandemic struck, classes closed and learning moved to students' homes.

Three and half months into pandemic-initiated, emergency teaching that has placed unprecedented demands on parents in ways I would never have dreamed possible just a few short weeks ago, I am thinking about home reading in a whole new way.

What have I learned...
I wonder if we need to consider championing the learning to read journey from a different perspective? I am wondering if we have unbalanced the learning to read process by relying too heavily on schools for reading instruction, support and growth without recognizing the value of our parents as partners in this process? I wonder if we should celebrate milestones on the learning to read journey as part of a child's growth, similar to other milestones like losing teeth, riding bicycles or moving through swimming, music or basketball lessons? I think the most important thing I've learned is that maybe - just maybe - we've pulled focus so much towards reading being a technically precise set of skills and strategies to be learned that we overlooked the tremendous importance of connecting reading to living in our families.

So, what does this mean?
Reading does require technical precision - there is no doubt about that - and most often the technically precise skills are most successfully acquired in orderly sequences. But reading also requires time, connection, risk-taking and investment by the reader, and these are not technically precise skills - they are usually elements students need to be invested in at home. Reliance on technical precision detracts from these additional elements to the point where they are sometimes not clearly evident at all as a child travels the learning to read path, struggling to find the time, make sense of the text, attempt books that might be interesting but will be tough to interpret within a family that understands 'learning to read' to be primarily the responsibility of schools. What this means is that home and school need to move beyond the somewhat adversarial relationships that occasionally exist when home reading becomes the topic of conversation to establish a deeper appreciation and understanding of the efforts both home and school must invest in a child to ensure a successful reader emerges. 

I believe it also means we all need to develop greater clarity around what successful reading means for it is so much more than just decoding, recognizing meaning, using expression and developing fluency. Successful reading is also getting lost in a story, asking questions and seeking answers, recognizing qualities of yourself in a character, asking for the sequel so you don't lose the relationship you have developed with the story. 

Being in this pandemic and building deeper connections with families as they have supported their children in so many myriad ways to ensure their children are meeting the expectations of teachers has led me to question the whole experience of home reading and whether reading at home could become a more natural experience if we supported parents in fostering a love of reading rather than practicing reading with parental oversight? 

What I have learned is to question my assumptions - some that I have held for a very long time - about the learning to read journey and how families and teachers might work together to best support children as they find joy in being readers as well as technically strong readers. This is something I need to mull over for awhile - another lesson from this pandemic time that is still forming, gathering strength and will most likely once again precipitate changes for the better for children who are taking their initial steps on the learning to read journey. 

Lorraine Kinsman, Principal
Eric Harvie School