This is Ann’s first blog…
Dear Teachers and Parents who teach,
I’ve been a reading teacher for years and I know how difficult it can be when you are teaching children to read.
You teach a sound and some students need extra practice to build mastery.
They have already memorized the curriculum reader so they need new materials.
You have already used all your own resources so you go to the store, but the books are based upon word recognition, repetitive text and pictures, not on phonics (sounding out words).
After careful hunting, maybe you get lucky and find some phonics books only to discover that the term “beginner” seems to mean something different to publishers than it does to teachers and parents.
There is nothing “beginner” about them. They are just regular stories that have been shortened.
Even when you finally find simple phonics books that can be sounded out, the text assumes you have taught the sounds in the order they prescribe and it uses sounds you haven’t taught yet.
Useless! Then, after even more hunting, you finally find some books that you can make work with a little prompting, but the stories and illustrations are so boring even an adult would rather rap their head with a ruler than read them.
That is why I started writing my own books.
My reading class needed more short a practice (as in the word cat) and they had already read all the appropriate books our school possessed.
Our community was 45 minutes up a mountain pass and I didn’t want to drive into town, so I quickly looked at the short a word list and wrote a book.
I scribbled out my best completely amateur cat sketches because at this stage of the reading game, pictures are vital to comprehension and then I went home.
The next morning the kids went wild. “You wrote a book for us?” I was used to that. I’d been writing my own materials for years. But then they insisted on reading the book even though class hadn’t started yet. “Sam” one of the boys read out loud.
He looked up at me with eyes dazzling with wonder and said “Sam is a cat?” (Our principal was also Sam.) He quickly flipped the page and read. “Sam is a cat.”
He and his brother both cheered and yelled “I knew it! I knew it!”
I had been trying to get that kid to read for weeks and he wouldn’t do it. Here he was reading before I had even started the lesson and I couldn’t stop him from reading on.
When they reached the page with the cat and the toilet paper, they just lost it.
They were rolling with laughter and the other children ran in from the hall to see what was so funny and they read the book too.
That’s when I realized that 5-7 year olds have a lot more enthusiasm than the socially cool and restrained middle schoolers I had previously been writing for. I was getting hooked too.
I wrote more books doing whatever I could to keep them surprised, curious, entertained and most of all…reading.
When I moved, I began substitute (aka. supply) teaching, a challenging job as you know.
Many of the behavior problems I saw were related to poor reading skills.
During Independent reading time, the low readers either just looked at the pictures or they played and got into trouble because there were no books at their reading level, so I started bringing my own books and did extra reading groups while the other grade level kids were reading.
The kids were thrilled to actually be reading words.
The enthusiastic responses from kids, teachers, assistants and parents led my husband (a Startup CEO) to encourage me to create my own business rather than go through the major publishers.
The world is changing and the good books are no longer being stifled by big publishers.
The good books are being self printed. The tricky part is getting the word out.
That’s where I need your help, my dear readers. If you have read to this point, then you too have some understanding of the reading challenges.
Maybe you share the same love of reading or the same struggles trying to get your young ones to read.
Please investigate our books and share what you have seen with your colleagues and friends.
I would like to get my books out into the classrooms and homeschools out there and I don’t want to see anymore children sitting on the classroom carpet crying because they can’t read. That’s just not right.
Let’s fight that, shall we?