Tonight, for the first time in many, many months, Anya read out loud to me. She normally hates reading out loud, as she does not like being evaluated. But she had this rain forest frogs book and wanted to share it, so, out of the blue, she asked if she could read parts of it to me.
Here are two of the paragraphs she read aloud, with only 2 pauses on the words "chemicals" and "moist":
Poison dart frogs don't need to hide or escape. They hop fearlessly about on the forest floor during the day. Their bright colors warn predators, "Don't touch me." Only a few animals can eat them, because their skin contains bitter-tasting chemicals. Some of these chemicals are very poisonous.
. . .
Many rain forest frogs do not lay their eggs in the water. The eggs of some frogs are protected by foam nests along the water's edge or on overhanging leaves. The foam keeps the eggs moist and helps protect them from predators. Often, the tadpoles hatch within the foam, and rain carries them into the water.
She read about 20-25 such paragraphs very well, the way an adult would, changing the tone of her voice and indicating the ends of sentences. I am not patting myself on the back, because I did not teach her to read. I gave her the very basics of phonics, those unreliable rules which are violated incessantly in our idiomatic language, and she taught herself from then on. I have not even tested her reading in any way in quite a few months. I saw her with books, I assumed that learning was taking place. (Even when, for months, those books were almost entirely Garfield comics; we now own virtually the entire series.)
Her reading tonight was not like the student readings I remember, where texts were recited in a monotone that made no exceptions for periods, commas, or dialogue. Anya read "very poisonous" quite dramatically, as she did other phrases and sentence clauses. She also stopped to insert her own comments, making connections between the text and her existing knowledge of rain forests, frogs, endangered species, etc. So I had no doubts about her reading comprehension. It was, altogether, nothing at all like "reading group" in my old elementary school. This is not so much because schools are doing something wrong, it's largely because they are failing to do something right, namely: let children choose what they read. If they find something they want to read, they're going to learn to read it.
Anyway, I have no idea what a third grade reading level looks like, so I went and googled "third grade reading level example." Argh!!!!
Apparently, one is not allowed to merely... like... read books in the third grade. No no no! You have to play games & do quizzes about "rhyme, rhythm, and alliteration" and "consonant blends and digraphs" and "using an index" and "root words" and "compound words, contractions, and common abbreviations". It's all about jargon, people!!! Have YOU taken the Homophone Challenge? Have YOU read 'Success with Suffixes'? Have YOU played 'Feast of Antonyms'?
As my husband says, institutional schooling is all about making you use your left brain, and your LEFT BRAIN ONLY. No wonder reading comprehension is difficult. These kids have been trained to the see the trees and nothing but the trees, and never the forest.
Another thing I came across was a list of spelling words for the 3rd grade. Now I ask you, does anyone seriously believe that a child won't learn to spell "park," "size," or "about" at some point? Even in the most disadvantaged neighborhoods? If you know that a kid is going to pick up words like "bike," "team," and "wash," and probably within another couple of years, is it really necessary to take up class time making them "use the word in a sentence" in third grade? Why not use that time to let them read what they want from the school library, instead?
Proper spelling simply gets absorbed, as do most grammatical rules, during reading. The other day Anya was doing a math worksheet that said "Name" and "Date" at the top, only she didn't know the date. So she wrote "UNKNOWN" in the Date slot. I had no idea she could spell that, and I don't think she considered whether or not she knew how to spell it... she just wrote it.
I think it is very useful to learn parts of speech, the definitions of prefix / suffix / root, and all of that. But it is trivially easy to teach this in, say, 7th grade, when kids have probably already noticed the ways that words are put together. By then, they will eat up jargon like "adjective" and "root word" because those terms will give a name to something they'd already noticed, if almost subconsciously. But to insist upon such knowledge in 3rd grade is simply a means of standing in the way of real reading.
You want kids to read better? Give them a library and a wonderful librarian*, and then stay the hell out of their way.
* We have one at our local public library who shares Anya's love for Bunnicula and first introduced us to Freddy.
You make a great point about kids being moved on to the next reading level as soon as possible, keeping them constantly frustrated. That's really unfortunate. Even when kids are reading books below their reading level, they are still cementing spelling & grammar rules simply by absorbing them from the text. Plus, not only does it make them more confident readers, but it allows them to read the book more dramatically (whether out loud, or just using their internal, mental voice) because they aren't distracted constantly by challenging words. My daughter used to say that yes, she could read, but she couldn't read "like the audiobooks." She meant that it was hard to imagine the setting, the voices, & the emotions because the text itself was still quite challenging. I submit that if you can't get wrapped up in a book enough to imagine the characters & their tone of voice & so on, you are not fully reading that book. But of course, in school it's simply a matter of being able to say the words aloud. (I'm sure we all remember listening to other kids reading aloud in a total monotone, with no regard for the ends of sentences!)
When we found the Freddy the Pig audiobooks, I realized that my kids can learn an immense amount of vocabulary, random cultural knowledge, figures of speech & proverbs, grammar and syntax, all from audiobooks. All that's missing is deciphering symbols (reading, as it's often measured in school) and correctly arranging symbols (spelling and punctuation). They get everything from an audiobook except the mechanics, in other words. In fact, they get more, because the voice acting is usually quite good, and those vocal cues help kids understand unfamiliar slang or vocabulary. The Freddy books are chock full of old proverbs and odd slang (plus the word "phaeton"). I guarantee my daughter learns more listening to Freddy than reading any of the crappy early readers used in my old elementary school.