GE570

My Reading Life (Carolyn Acker)     I have been a reader from the time I acquired the ability and books continue to be an integral part of my life.  I read daily and if I have a day or two where I cannot find at least a few minutes to read, I begin to long for a way to escape my responsibilities.  It sounds a bit like an addiction, I admit, but I really do need to read!  Any symptoms of withdrawal, thankfully, are quickly alleviated by some time with a good book.  My home is filled with books due to my reading habit, and my three children have inherited my habit, much like my mother passed her reading habit on to me.     My mother read voraciously throughout the rearing of her nine children and continues to read at the age of 80, albeit at a slower pace.  While I don’t remember her reading to me as a small child, I have a clear picture of my mother reading a book on the beach in the summer while we swam, on the stoop of our home in Brooklyn while we played, and at the tabl

The fact that literacy is a fundamental cornerstone to a student’s academic success is extremely powerful.  I look at this from two different angles, my own reading experience and then my experience with my children.  As a young child I remember my teachers making reading fun. If we read multiple books, we would be rewarded with free pizza from Pizza Hut.     Now I see my children who are in kindergarten and first grade receive enthusiastic reader awards, which is accompanied by an award ceremony.  Chances are given to receive tickets to a baseball game for reading multiple books and completing a short book evaluation.  They have multiple opportunities to purchase books, which yields free books for their classroom.  Their teachers also make reading fun.  I have also noticed that at their current levels, they do utilize both whole language as well as phonics approaches to literacy.    The debate between the two differing types of instructional methods used to develop reading f

I learned to read in kindergarten, and I actually remember it rather well. I recall being dimly aware that we were in homogeneous reading groups and that mine was comprised of the best readers in the class; still, I was jealous of this kid Matt, who got to go to first grade during reading time. Always a striver, I wanted to know what I had to do to go to first grade for reading. . . turns out Matt had stayed back to work on his behavior, but he was a good reader. Eventually he skipped back up a grade. Meanwhile, I was in my reading circle in kindergarten using a basal reader featuring characters with names that seemed highly unusual to me, including "Rosa" and "Laddie" (the latter may have been the golden retriever who frolicked on the pages of that textbook). These  early memories of reading are definitely rooted in phonics instruction. I remember very little about how I was taught to comprehend --everything was decoding words and little else. We did seemingly

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