Literacy Now

"But Daddy, I can't read the words.”

This statement stopped me dead in my tracks. My daughter, Zoe, was three years old. It was bedtime and I was in her doorway, about to close the door. She had slept with a book every single night since it was safe to leave objects in her crib, and since she graduated to her big-girl bed, it was a nightly tradition for her to select a few titles to sleep with. This sudden insecurity was a make-or-break moment for me as a father. Even though we had been reading three to five picture books per day since her birth, Zoe's reading life could be unraveled by my response.

I sat on the edge of her bed and told her, “You can read the pictures, and the pictures tell the story as well.”  Her face filled with a newfound confidence. Her dad was right; through the illustrations she was able to read the book and follow the story. I pulled a few wordless picture books off of her shelf, like OWLY & WORMY: FRIENDS ALL AFLUTTER by Andy Runton, and TUESDAY by David Wiesner, and she happily got back to reading when she was meant to be sleeping.

Over the ensuing weeks, my daughter’s insecurity vanished and she continued to read book after book. Please note that I am not putting the word “read” in quotation marks, because my daughter was in fact reading—she was reading the pictures. She was following a narrative cover to cover, and eventually she began putting sounds together.

Jeff Mack's GOOD NEWS, BAD NEWS was the first book where she read the entire text aloud all by herself. (The book consists of five words, and it's hilarious.) As she grew over the months, I challenged her to read more of the text in the picture books as we read together. BINK AND GOLLIE and LING AND TING are some heavily-illustrated early readers that she especially enjoyed. I attempted reading aloud books with more challenging texts and selected JAMES AND THE GIANT PEACH, the edition lavishly illustrated by Lane Smith. She loved it so much that when I later suggested we read CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY because the author, Roald Dahl, had also written JAMES AND THE GIANT PEACH, Zoe looked at me indignantly and said, “No Daddy, that book was written by James Henry Trotter” (a.k.a. the book’s protagonist).

But when we turned to read another one of my childhood favorites, THE MOUSE AND THE MOTORCYCLE by Beverly Cleary, she lost interest. At first I thought it might be the story; perhaps my daughter wouldn't take to all of the same characters that I had loved as a kid. But then I realized that the problem wasn't the narrative, but the book's sparse illustrations. Great as they are, there just weren't enough illustrations to hold her interest. She wasn't as involved with the reading process because she wasn't able to follow along on her own. We put the book aside and will revisit when she's a little older.

I often rail against the grown-ups who want to push their children out of picture books too early. At first I feared that I was becoming that which I preach against, but I reassured myself that I had remained in tune with my daughter's comfort level. And besides, when she does read chapter books independently, I do hope that we as a family still cuddle up at night to read aloud a good picture book.

It's my hope that teachers could adopt this same mentality. Why not take some time out of the sixth grade school day to read aloud a great picture book, old or new? I am of course, no trained educator, but as an author of children's literature I am often asked for reading advice. I've written twenty-three books, but it's as a parent that I can tell you with confidence: to create a reader from the ground up, you cannot go wrong with a book that has a strong picture to text connection with a high interest and low readability.

Jarrett J. Krosoczka is the author and illustrator of twenty books, which include picture books (PUNK FARM), graphic novels (LUNCH LADY AND THE CYBORG SUBSTITUTE) and chapter books (PLATYPUS POLICE SQUAD: THE FROG WHO CROAKED). Jarrett will celebrate the release of his next picture book, PEANUT BUTTER AND JELLYFISH, on April 8, 2014. His work has been featured in THE NEW YORK TIMES and USA TODAY, and on PBS and NPR’s ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. His TED Talk, which chronicles his path to publication despite challenging childhood circumstances, has amassed more than a half a million views online.

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On a rainy day, I curl up in an overstuffed armchair reading a good book while munching on a chocolate crunch bar. I travel through dark forests looking for a mysteriously lost key with Nancy Drew. I search unexplored territories in the land of Narnia with Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy. I learn to reason, to think, to ask questions, to disagree, to disarm, to have an opinion, to predict, and to live through the characters and places I visit in a book. I learn I’m okay being different than you. I uncross my legs, plant my feet on the carpeted floor, and ponder awhile—taking one last bite.

Flashback to the scenario above, and that’s where you would have found me on a rainy day. But is this the experience of most eleven year olds in the United States today?  What was a pleasurable experience for me as a fifth grader I think is not a mirror reflection for others of the same age now.  What has changed for students of today? Why is the reading experience an enjoyable journey for some while an insurmountable task for others?  

The Struggle

If an experience is not a pleasant one for us, we tend to avoid it. If attacking the printed word creates a consistent struggle, the decision to avoid presents an easy choice. Picture a page in a classic novel, for example, THE ADVENTURES OF TOM SAWYER, in which the words when read with ease create an image in the reader’s mind of a boy’s cleverness and sense of adventure and propels the reader onward to find out how Tom will get out of his next scrape. Yet, for those readers who find the words dancing around on the page, the act of reading becomes an insurmountable challenge and the content is lost in the struggle. This student can only glean meaning from others’ reading of the material and oral discussions in class and, in this sense, is robbed of the experience of comfort brought by settling down with a good book.

When examinations are given to assess the reason for the reading struggle, a student may be found to have dyslexia or a specific language learning disability. The question remains, what we can do for these struggling learners? Reading and learning become intertwined as the student grows and faces more reading in the content areas. Then the reading problem becomes a learning issue.

When empowered by an educational system which seeks to find out the root of the reading issue for this student, he/she can make gains in the reading endeavor through appropriate remediation measures, therapeutic in nature. However, we must be proactive at an early age. Studies have shown that intervention needs to take place before the fourth grade year.

The Criminal Act of Non-Intervention

If the student does not receive the appropriate measures of intervention, then we may have lost him/her as a learner and perhaps as a contributing citizen in the future. Extensive studies have taken place, which demonstrate with potency the correlation between reading delays and possible future jail time. For example, from the ARIZONA REPUBLIC, September of 2004,

“When the state of Arizona projects how many prison beds it will need, it factors in the number of kids who read well in fourth grade. Evidence shows that children who do not read by third grade often fail to catch up and are more likely to drop out of school, take drugs, or go to prison. So many nonreaders wind up in jail that Arizona officials have found they can use the rate of illiteracy to help calculate future prison needs.”

The evidence in this article shows us the immediacy of need for America’s children. By helping our children, we help ourselves and in another sense, protect the lives of our children and loved ones. We need to ask ourselves what we can do to eradicate this predictive cycle for struggling learners. We need to be actively committed to reading intervention in the early years.

Strategy Empowerment

What are some strategies we can use to help challenged readers? I think providing therapeutic reading intervention is the key. After my training through the Neuhaus Education Center in Houston and becoming a Certified Academic Language Therapist, I felt empowered to help learners who struggled daily in school with the printed word. Through a three to four day a week commitment and regular attention to activities tailored to aid in phonemic awareness and phonics instruction, students were able to make gains.

Repetition played a significant role in their success as they recognized familiar patterns in words and learned more about appropriate junctures for syllable breaks in multi-syllabic words as they progressed. Once automaticity had kicked in, I realized they had overcome a huge struggle in decoding the printed word and had at long last paved the way to becoming fluent readers.

Robert was one of the students I tutored for a period of three years. However, after only one year of therapy, I noticed a significant change in him as a reader. Robert first came to me as an end of the year third grader. His reading fluency was labored and he read at a stilted pace. His mother reported he was frustrated as a learner and falling behind. After ten months of intervention work, Robert’s reading began to become less labored, and he achieved a fluidity I had not heard before. His attitude improved toward school as we continued to work together and his self-esteem rose, according to his mother. Robert exemplifies a student who at first sees reading as an unachievable feat, yet then, with the proper intervention, metamorphoses into one who wants to read independently.

Then the question is posed, what do we do for that child who reads like the wind, yet comprehends absolutely nothing when questioned about what is understood from the text? Many times, this student can be directly taught to use strategies to aid in reading success.  This reader must slow down and tap into a meta-cognitive state, or thinking about thinking. This student needs direct instruction in what the strategies are and how to use them. This student may have the habit of running roughshod over multisyllabic words without thought to meaning within context, and needs to be specifically instructed to sound out word parts before moving on to the next word.

A United Stance

I cannot underestimate the power of a team effort in this endeavor to encourage students toward independence as readers. My hope is that parents and teachers will work together to foster the desire to read for pleasure at the first moment a glimmer of free time presents itself. We are the models students will seek to emulate.  They must first see us as readers and, in addition, know we truly care about them and are committed to their growth as readers before they will seek the pages of a book on their own.

As reading advocates, we must pull together in a united front to aid in this war against time for our children. We must stand together in our commitment to help students become readers before we have lost the window of opportunity for our children. After all, the future of our children in a symbiotic sense is that of our own.
So where are our children and where will they be when we look for them in ten, twenty, thirty years? I’d like to think we would find them curled up in an overstuffed armchair taking off for unchartered adventures, or better yet, taking part in achieving personal goals which benefit us all.

Lea G. Melville, M.Ed., earned her Reading Specialist certification in 2000, and serves third graders at Briargrove Elementary School in Houston, Texas welcoming her 25th year as a teacher.  A native Houstonian, Lea enjoys travelling and learning about other cultures.  She sees herself as a lifelong learner and hopes to inspire her students to acquire the same vision for themselves.

I know the subset of humanity who will attempt to ‘correct’ me and say, “You mean, kids (and grownups) ‘think’ they see ghosts.” No…actually, I mean what I say, kids see ghosts. I’ve collected over 500 stories from direct interviews backed by signed waivers of many people who shared their true tales with me about encounters with ghosts, spirits, angels, and more. I’ve written nine books of ghost stories and it’s clear to me from anecdotal evidence that children experience psychic reality just like adults.

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I’m a professional storyteller and when I finish a performance of one of my ghost story programs—I have so many ghostly tales that they’re broken down into various programs, such as Civil War Ghosts, Hispanic Spirits, Shaker Ghosts, Animal Ghosts—children desperately want to talk to me afterwards to share their own experiences, and I mean kids of any age. They’ve seen orbs, had crazy Ouija board happenings, talked to deceased relatives, spent their youth with an invisible friend, and talked of being in heaven before their birth. I believe that children deserve to be listened to and respected for what they have seen, heard, and felt.

Kids meet developmental stages for not just body, mind and emotional growth; they also move through life testing out and finding experiential bases for psychic/spiritual growth as well. No matter what their parents and other adults say, they have to test their own notions in the real world. And a certain percentage of kids are particularly sensitive.

Now, a child will use whatever language and media images they have at their disposal to talk about their experience the previous night. One boy in Hawaii told his mother over breakfast, “God is walking through the walls at night.” Doesn’t make any sense, right? But he had recently seen the movie BRUCE ALMIGHTY and God, played by African American Morgan Freeman, walked through walls. So this eight year old was basically saying that he saw a dark skin native Hawaiian coming through a multi-dimensional portal. His parents listened, recruited a native shaman, and they took care of closing that energetic doorway.

Storytelling is an entertaining and safe way for kids to listen and wonder and ask about the other realm. And they can take whichever wisdom they want, regardless of the belief system of the parents/family. Many of the ghost stories that I tell also carry moral lessons, such as doing good during our life before actions are more problematical when reoriented into the astral dimension in that final transition. Kids see dead birds, dead grandma in the coffin and see lots of violence on electronic screens. Ghost stories for Halloween—and kids will happily tolerate ghost stories anytime of year—allow the younger and older members of society to look at death, life and what may very well survive the cessation of the physical body.

In HALLOWEEN SLEEPWALKER, a boy wants to go outside and explore on Halloween night. His family talks about their fears related to Halloween and he insists, fearless and adventuresome, that he’d like to go out that night. Denied permission, he heads to bed and later that night gets out of bed to sleepwalk. He goes outside and encounters witches and ghosts. Given an enchanted apple, he temporarily has the second sight. The witches also send him flying on a magic broom.

This fanciful tale allows children to imagine their own wild Halloween fantasies and brings the idea of “third eye” viewing into play. What is our accepted matrix of reality, and do we automatically give that to children, or can they be allowed the freedom to imagine other dimensional strands in the Universe? When I tell ghost stories, I help children deal with a basketful of issues, such as fear of ghosts, appropriate boundary setting and communicating with the dead, testing of magical thinking as balanced with spiritual realities, and permission to simply talk about what is often invisible, denied and yet right in front of many a child’s radar. Our children need tools for dealing with spirits, angels, and with visions—glimpses of information not gained through traditional modes.

I’ve told ghost stories from pre-school to assisted living, and I can tell you that at any and every age level, I can find two peers sitting side by side, with one wide eyed, “I’m going to have nightmares!” and their buddy next to them saying, “That’s not scary enough!” It’s a finely tuned exercise to bring scary tales into a safe environment, but through well-selected stories—some funny and outrageous—songs, and by allowing kids to state their opinions and note their experiences, children benefit greatly from hearing ghost stories.

I back up my ghost story programs with nonfiction books, research, and interviews drawn from my trips around Kentucky, and as far as Alaska and Argentina. We find ghost stories in every tribe, each culture and every state of the union and in each country. From the banshee to La Llorona, witches to disappearing ghosts, common themes emerge in ghost stories. Many of the true tales which I write about and tell in performances are actually heartfelt interventions of deceased loved ones, family or friends, providing rescue or other timely help in our life. Children are now a fairly sophisticated audience, being familiar through television with orbs, EVPs, EMF meters and other tools and terms of ghost hunters.

In most families, they have already seen and heard more than you know. Do you know about Stick Man? Ask any class of fifth graders and a dozen hands will go up. What do you say when your seven year old says, “There’s something under my bed!” Likely the parent will nod sympathetically, talk blandly about nighttime fears and send the kid off to bed—father knows best? But here in Louisville, Bonnie Phillips, a woman who ‘clears’ houses tells a story about arranging a house clearing for a family with two kids. Bonnie tells the host parents to make sure that the kids are off to school or with grandparents, all the pets are out of the home, because “we may stir things up”.

In this case, the younger daughter who had special needs slept with mom and dad, and the boy, off in his own bedroom, was reporting the troublesome spirits. Bonnie met the parents on the front porch and then proceeded into the house, Bonnie going in one direction and her daughter Amber heading into the boy’s bedroom. Amber heard a hiss and a growl from under the boy’s bed. She immediately thought the parents hadn’t removed the cat or dog. She went back to the front porch, in a huff, accusing them, “We can’t do our job until your remove your pets!” The parents looked at them with a blank stare, replying, “We don’t have any pets.”

In 2006, a survey found that while only 24% of Americans could name two Supreme Court Justices, 77% could name two of Snow White’s dwarves.

I find that disturbing.

Not because the Supreme Court is more important than Snow White. I will, in fact, argue just the opposite.

No, I find that survey’s results disturbing because the dwarves in the original Snow White stories don’t have any names.

In this essay I will tell you the real story of Snow White; or rather, the real stories—for the Brothers Grimm published more than one version of the tale. Those versions are, as you might guess, rather bloody and rather grim. And so, once I’ve recounted the tale’s twisted history, I will explain why those bloody, grim incarnations of Snow White are exactly the ones that you should be sharing with your children and your students.

In 1806, the most famous folklorist in Germany was not named Grimm. His name was Clemens Brentano. He had recently published a collection of German folksongs, but was looking to start working with folk tales as well.

He was introduced to two young brothers who had recently graduated from law school, but found their passions flowing rather towards folklore than the law. Brentano asked for their scholarly assistance. Would they help him collect stories from the people of Germany, so that he might publish them?

These two young scholars, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, took up the challenge zealously. They invited acquaintances and amateur story-tellers from all walks of life—petty aristocrats and French Huguenot exiles and bankrupt soldiers—to their home and wrote down the stories they heard.

In 1810, the Brothers Grimm sent forty-nine tales to Clemens Brentano. Among them were the stories of Sleeping Beauty, Rumpelstiltskin, The Frog Prince, and Snow White.

Those stories were not seen again for more than a hundred years. Brentano, it seems, took them to a monastery in Alsace and left them there. Luckily, the Brothers Grimm, like the diligent scholars that they were, had backed up their work. They’d made copies.

So in 1812, once it became clear that Brentano was not following through on his project, the Brothers Grimm published their own editions of the fairy tales. They didn’t call them “fairy tales,” though, since there is not a single fairy in their book. In German, the Grimm tales are called Kinder- und Hausmärchen, which means “Children’s and Household Tales,” and is pronounced “KIN-der oont house-MYARE-cccccccchen.” That last syllable relies on you hocking a loogie while speaking. Good luck with that.

Over the next forty-five years the Brothers Grimm published a total of seven editions of the fairy tales, and their reputation steadily grew. In 1870, not long after the Brothers’ deaths, the Grimm’s fairy tales were incorporated into the teaching curriculum of Prussia. By the turn of the century, the Tales of the Brothers Grimm had become the second best-selling book in Germany, behind only the Bible—a distinction it holds to this day. In the English-speaking world, it had become wildly successful as well. In 1900, The Daily Mail of London named it one of the ten books all children must own. And in 1937 Walt Disney began his full-length motion picture empire with Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, breaking box-office records and winning a special Academy Award. It is no exaggeration to say that those two young German scholars changed the world.

But how? What did they do that was so special? There were folklorists before them (like Brentano) and after them. Why do their stories still take pride of place, two hundred years later?

The Brothers Grimm had a peculiar combination of scholarly brilliance and artistic flair. Jacob, the older brother, was the task-master and the father-figure. Wilhelm was the artist—though also a scholar in his own right. Together, they cast a wide net, bringing in hundreds of stories, and then choosing those they deemed the most typical of the German folk and the most satisfying for children and adults. Wilhelm in particular revised the stories that they heard, adding delicious and dark details and elevating the prose.

An excellent example of this process is the tale entitled “Schneewittchen” (SCHNAY-vitt-chen), or “Little Snow White.”

The final, 1857 edition of the tale has a great deal in common with the most famous retelling, Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. I’ll merely point out the major differences, assuming you remember the film.

In the 1857 version of Snow White, the step-mother does not ask the Huntsman to bring back the little girl’s heart, as she does in the film. She asks, rather, for Snow White’s lungs and liver. When the hunter fools her by bringing the lungs and liver of a young boar instead, she “boils them in salt” and she eats them. Which is awesome.

Little Snow White runs off to the dwarves, who, as I mentioned before, have no names. They also have no individuated personalities. The queen comes to the dwarves’ house not once, but three times, and each time she leaves with Snow White apparently dead. The third time, the queen returns with what the Brothers Grimm describe as “a poisonous, poisonous apple”—it’s so poisonous you have to say it twice. One face of the apple is deadly, the other is not, and she convinces her step-daughter to taste the apple by biting the wholesome side herself. Schneewittchen takes a bite and falls down dead.

The dwarves are unable to revive her, so they put her in a glass coffin, embossed with her name and birth. Many years later, a prince comes to the house and sees the dead girl. And he falls in love with her. Which, you have to admit, is kind of weird.

He asks to buy the girl from the dwarves, but they refuse. He tells them that he will die if he can’t see her every day for the rest of his life. As his servants are carrying her home, they drop her, and the jolt effectively performs the Heimlich maneuver on Snow White. A chunk of poison apple comes flying out of her mouth and she returns to life.

That’s right—there is no kiss. Just Snow White getting dropped.

Snow White and the prince get married, and the evil step-mother is invited to the wedding. Here’s my favorite part. When she sees Snow White, alive and marrying a prince, she is “so petrified with fright that she could not budge. Iron slippers had already been heated over a fire, and they were brought over to her with tongs. Finally, she had to put on the red-hot slippers and dance until she fell down dead.”

The End.

(I LOVE IT.)

So that’s the real, Grimm version of Snow White.

At least, the real, 1857 version. But already, Jacob and Wilhelm had made many revisions to the tale. Perhaps the most interesting is this: in the first published edition of the story, in 1812, there is no step-mother. In the 1812 version, the evil queen is HER MOM. How much scarier and more vivid is her jealous rage at the little girl’s beauty when that little girl is her daughter? Instead of merely telling the huntsman to kill Snow White and bring back her organs, this wonderful mother says, “Take her out into the woods to a remote spot, and stab her to death.” And then she eats her organs. (Or thinks she does.)

The ending is different, too. Not the iron-hot shoes—that happens in every edition (if it ain’t broke…!). In the 1812 edition of the story, the prince manages to get the coffin home without dropping it. He makes his servants carry it with him from room to room, so that he might gaze on his beloved. One of the servants eventually gets fed up having to lug this enormous glass box around, so he opens it and smacks the comatose girl. At which point, the chunk of apple flies from her throat, and she wakes up. Which is even more hilarious than dropping her.

Of all the editions, I’d have to say that 1812 is my favorite; that’s the one I’d share with kids. But better than sharing just one edition, I think, is sharing them all. For when we know the many layers of a story, our reading becomes as rich as its history.

So should you be sharing these gruesome stories with your kids at all?

Yes, I believe you should.

Fairy tales speak to children and adults on two levels simultaneously. The primary level is narrative—fairy tales are, in most cases, good stories that are well told. The other level, though, is deeper; it is the level of our most basic, oldest emotions.

Cinderella is not just about a girl who gets to go to a ball and marry a prince. It is about a hero who is unappreciated, who is more beautiful and more valuable than anyone recognizes. We have all felt unappreciated—by parents or siblings, classmates or coworkers. Most of us believe we are capable of great things, if only people would see us clearly. Children, more than adults, feel this way; and rightly so, for they have yet to achieve their enormous potential.

Snow White tells a different emotional tale. This is a story of competition. The (step-)mother loves her daughter—until the little girl threatens her position as the most beautiful in the land. Then the queen wants not only to kill her, but to eat her organs, as if ingesting her will allow the woman to take on the little girl’s beauty.

As children grow, parents sometimes feel competitive with them: the dad who resents that his son is growing stronger, faster, physically more talented than he; the mom who can’t bear to see her daughter’s sexuality eclipsing her own. But while this competition is sometimes harbored by the parent, it is always harbored by the child. Every boy wishes his mother would love him more than she loves his father. Every girl wants her father’s attention to stay glued upon her, even when her mother is around. Freud called this the Oedipus Complex, but I don’t see it as sexual; it’s about primacy of love.

Some of you are with me right now, and some of you are rolling your eyes. “My son doesn’t want me to love him more than I love my husband,” you’re thinking. You’re right. He doesn’t. But also, he does. At the same time. Minds are complex like that.

Children love their parents, and yet feel these competitive emotions intensely. The best fairy tales—and Snow White is among the very best—give children a way to fantasize about their difficult, darkest feelings, and to project them onto evil fathers and step-mothers, rather than their own parents, thereby working them out. Fairy tales give children the faith that those feelings do not make them evil and will not swallow them up. They will ultimately be integrated, and become a small part of the triumphant story of that child’s life.

Which this is the most important thing. Children are optimists. Fairy tales teach them that their optimism is well-founded.

This is why I write the books that I do, weaving Grimm narratives of my own. And this is why we should share Grimm stories with our kids, and with our students. To prove to them that though they pass through the darkest zones, they shall emerge stronger and wiser in the end.

Adam Gidwitz is the author of two ALA Notable, New York Times best-selling books A Tale Dark and Grimm and In a Glass Grimmly. His third book, The Grimm Conclusion, is out now. For more on the subject of real, scary fairy tales and why they’re good for children, read Adam Gidwitz’s In Defense of Real Fairy Tales, on the Wall Street Journal’s Speakeasy Blog or visit his website.

Close reading is a challenge for many of us. The concept may not be, but inviting students to enjoy and be active in close reading is...well...interesting.

Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey's Teaching Edge presentation at the 2013 IRA Convention affirmed the power of annotating. However, the act of annotating—the act of close reading—is often personal to the reader. How we model or portray our close reading for developing readers can be perceived as communicating the “right way to read,” which may stunt a reader's confidence. Showing students and giving them ideas on how to think, rather than what to think, requires a layer of scaffolding and confidence-building before students can accept the practice of close reading for their own, beyond a mini-lesson.

I’ve always thought that one of the most attractive books is a “gently loved” book, one covered with highlights, annotations, circles, and underlines. Consequently, I mark texts into oblivion. One for the Murphy's, Counting by 7's, My Life As A Book, and Elijah of Buxton are among my most pillaged—excuse me, gently loved books. Marking up the text allowed me to reflect, analyze writing, and thinking through strategic reading (i.e. reciprocal teaching strategies). My theory is: if students can see what how I am reading, they will be more encouraged to mimic my close reading. For many struggling readers and curious readers, the greatest blessing benefitting their reading is found in books I have read...and annotated.

I leave these texts in the classroom library for readers. My fifth and sixth grade readers love the “thinking” found within the margins of gently loved books. They are attracted to these books because they feel comprehension is more accessible. One reader, while reading One for the Murphy's wrote down two phrases from the text and told everyone how and why they were important lines, something new to this 11-year-old reader. Upon conferring with the student, I realized that she borrowed the phrases I had already underlined, as her own. When asking her why the two lines were important, she identified the implicit humor in one line and “everlasting” idea in the second line. The scaffold worked. She now looks for phrases in her own reading.

The already underlined phrases (and other annotations) presented a scaffold in two ways: 1) They are training the reader to look for subtle nuances and author's style within the text that influence meaning, theme, and overall comprehension (a.k.a. close reading); and 2) while modeling close reading in a mini-lesson exposes the concept, for some learners, seeing the thinking, the physical action of close reading within the text, is believing! Having the chance to look at someone's physical writing in margins, gives the maturing readers and chance to ponder how and why another reader arrived at a prediction, question, or clarification, invites intrigue in act of reading and reading comprehension. Some students just need that gentle scaffold, of borrowing someone else's work, to give them a jolt of confidence that inspires them to take “thinking” risks during their independent reading.

Portraying our reading lives helps students develop their reading lives. Annotating text and leaving maturing readers the blue prints is one more way to help maturing readers, not only enjoy reading, but find the treasures author's leave for discovery.

Justin Stygles (@JustinStygles) is a Grade 5/6 ELA/Humanities teacher at Guy E. Rowe School in Norway, Maine, justin.vocabularyteacher@yahoo.com.

Teaching in ACTion is a series from the Advisory Committee of Teachers (ACT), an International Reading Association committee comprised of exemplary reading and literacy teachers from around the world. Educators who best exemplify the mission of IRA are chosen from a pool of applicants to serve a three-year term. Among other responsibilities, the main charge of ACT is to be the conduit between IRA’s members and the board of directors.

ACT invites member to engage in the conversation by sending responses to us. ACT’s goal is to get a feel for how members feel about current hot topics, so that we may better serve members by sharing their concerns with the board of directors.