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.
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.
