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GKP Writing News

Encouraging Literacy

There’s a push in St. Louis encouraging literacy among students usually shoved aside. St. Louis schools have long been having problems trying to meet state standards and innovative approaches help.

Many of these students live in poverty. There are few, if any, books in their homes. Parents who read set an example for their children.

Why Promote Literacy?

Reading is basic. If a student can’t read, that student fails in every subject as all of them require reading.

In my area the schools rely on something called AR. This has a reading list and students are required to read books from it, take a comprehension test and go on to the next. It sounds good. It isn’t.

Teaching Reading

When I was in high school, my mother became involved with Laubach Literacy teaching illiterate adults to read and write. One out of five adults in the U.S. was statistically reading below a fourth grade level, unable to fill out an employment application.

One young man, just turned 16, was a student. My mother found he could read. He hated to. The only books he read were technical ones, difficult to understand. The key was finding books on topics he enjoyed. Reading was not drudgery, but fun.

Books come on all subjects, on all levels, in so many sizes. Somewhere there is a book to interest almost any student.

Love of Reading

Forcing students to read doesn’t encourage reading. It discourages it. That is what caught my eye about the St. Louis approach. It uses videos and comic books to interest students. It makes reading fun.

The material doesn’t shy away from vocabulary. It introduces new words, big words. My Laubach background says to repeat a new word five times and this program seems to do that.

cover of "For Love of Goats" by Karen GoatKeeper
A third piece of literacy is speaking. Just because you can talk, doesn’t mean you know how to speak clearly as when leaving phone messages or doing presentations. One way to promote good diction is saying tongue twisters. “For Love of Goats” is full of tongue twisters and alliterations, perfect for helping with pronunciation and growing vocabulary.

Reading and Writing

Reading is the beginning. It’s a great way to get information, explore the imagination. Writing lets students tell others about this and exercise their own imaginations.

So many students hate to write. School lessons are often tedious and, like with reading, forced assignments on given topics.

This is where an approach like NaNo’s Young Writer’s Program comes into play. You can check it out at www.nanowrimo.org.

We hear so much about making our country great again. The first step to acomplishing that is by encouraging literacy.

By Karen GoatKeeper

Karen GoatKeeper loves to write. Her books include picture books, novels and nonfiction for science activity books and nature books. A recent inclusion are science teaching units.
The coming year has goals for two new novels, a picture book and some books of personal essays. This is ambitious and ignores time constraints.
She lives in the Missouri Ozarks with her small herd of Nubian dairy goats. The Ozarks provides the inspiration and setting for most of her books.