Freedom Summer

Try to see it from a kid’s point of view. School is NOT in session. The days are long, warm and sunny. There’s finally time for TV, video games, bike rides, swimming and theme parks. Summer feels like freedom to kids. 

Educators and years of research tell us that there’s a cost for that freedom: students falling behind. 

The stakes are high. According to the National Summer Learning Association “more than half of the achievement gap between lower- and higher-income youth can be explained by unequal access to summer learning opportunities. As a result, low-income youth are less likely to graduate from high school or enter college.”

So what can we do to let kids keep their freedom without the cost of summer learning loss?

Snappy headlines like Parents: Preventing Summer Slide (on a Budget) or 74 Creative Ways to Stop Summer Brain Drain seem to insist that we can easily do something to keep kids from falling behind. In reality we know it is not that easy, especially when reading may not be a favorite thing to do or kids just aren’t interested in the trip to the museum or keeping a journal. 


Start by finding out what kids really want to do this summer. So much advice for parents focuses on what parents would like to do with kids or what parents think kids should do during the summer months. Try not to let your nostalgia for camping interfere with your child’s desire to learn to code. 

Find out why reading is not a favorite activity. If kids are really miserable about reading, find out why. Talking honestly with kids might make them more passionate readers.

Drop your preconceptions of what reading is. Just because the school or library recommended reading list is filled with book titles, that doesn’t mean that a child who is thoroughly engaged instead by online news articles, magazines, comic books, recipes or even trading cards isn’t reading. Really talk to your kids about what they are reading — no matter what it is — and help them feel validated as readers even when their reading material of choice is not a book.

Read aloud. Again, it doesn’t have to be a book. Reading together offers many opportunities to talk, talk, talk about what you’ve read. If you aren’t comfortable reading aloud, try listening to an audio book together. And make sure that you are visibly doing your own reading. We can’t expect kids to see the value of reading if adults are modeling something different.

Let kids explore. That always sounds like such a great idea. Turn kids loose

and they will magically find things that interest them. If kids were good at exploring, you wouldn’t be hearing “I’m bored” so often. Check in with them about the things that seem energize them, like caring for a pet, a little karaoke or baking cookies with friends. Those are leads to explore further. You also have to show them what’s out there in the world — and not just the things you are interested in or what you think kids are interested in, but the real unknowns. Just because a young girl loves pink and coming up with new hairstyles for dolls, doesn’t mean she wouldn’t love to spend time looking at cells under a microscope.

Go to the library. Preserving kids’ freedom doesn’t preclude trips to the library. In fact, the library is actually kids’ greatest opportunity for choice. Local public libraries have books, audio books, magazines, newspapers, access to online resources, free Internet access, clubs, opportunities to read to dogs and more, including events and programs that encourage and reward reading. Check out: Arlington Public Library Summer Reading, Alexandria Library's SummerQuest,  SummerQuest Jr. and  "Spark a Reaction" Teen Reading Challenge. For a canine flair, try Arlington Public Library's "Paws to Read" program and Fairfax County Public Library “Paws to Read." DC Public Library has teamed up with the Washington Nationals to offer summer reading for readers of all ages.

Seek advice. If the long lists of parent ideas aren’t cutting it, a teacher or librarian would be happy to make suggestions for some summer learning fun. There are also Web-based resources that can guide you with reading recommendations and activity ideas that won’t have you spending half your summer at the craft store. Try Start with a Book for fun and meaningful interactions around books and things of kid interest. Sign up for Camp Wonderoplis and head online for exciting scientific explorations. Or pursue a reading challenge together with Scholastic, Barnes and Noble or BOOK IT!

Summer is important for learning, but it can be a different kind of education. It can be about learning to make choices, try new things, and finding and exploring new interests. Once kids realize there are no worksheets involved, they’ll see that books and reading were made for this kind of summer learning. They can linger in the barn with Charlotte and Wilbur, get inside the head of Albert Einstein or George Washington Carver, feel free to laugh louder at Captain Underpants, Walter the Farting Dog and Timmy Failure. They can have more chances to think more deeply about the world and their place in it.

Guest blog post by TRC Advisory Council member and Belle of the Book, Rachael Walker.

To receive credit for this online training, please fill out the form here.

Resilience

What is that special something that enables a person to survive and sometimes even excel under challenging circumstances? What factors or resources strengthen or bolster a child? The September 2013 issue of Educational Leadership explored the concept of resilience and its role in learning.
     
A study described in the issue, Resilience and At-risk Children and Youth, explains that resilience has two parts: "1) An exposure to great risk; and 2) Corresponding factors that help promote positive outcomes or reduce negative outcomes." (p. 3) At-risk children, like the kids TRC serves, often experience multiple risk factors. When these factors occur together, they multiply the behavior problem. For example, "children in families that had accumulated two risk factors showed a more than fourfold increase in behavior problems" when compared to families with one stress factor. (p.4)

In the same issue of Educational Leadership, Nan Henderson’s article, Havens of Resilience, describes protective factors that help kids develop their resilience. The author created a graphic, the Resiliency Wheel, that represents the resiliency-building conditions that have been identified through research.

 Nan Henderson's Resiliency Wheel
from Educational Leadership, September 2013

According to Henderson, the most important environmental protective factor is providing caring and support. The other five factors grow out of it.

The structure and content of TRC's Read-Aloud program provide several protective factors that help kids weather challenging situations. 

At the beginning of each Read-Aloud, volunteers set and communicate high expectations and also set clear and consistent boundaries when they remind kids about TRC’s Promises (Listen, Respect, Cooperate and Have Fun). Consistently reminding the kids about the Promises and enforcing them every week helps the kids know what to expect and reduces their stress.

Every time a volunteer asks a child for his opinion about a story or encourages her to choose a book to take home, the volunteer is expressing his perception of the child as a reader, another high expectation.

By taking the time to ask questions, listening to what kids say about the books being read aloud and providing engaging activities, volunteers create opportunities for meaningful participation and teach life skills.

Getting to know the children and encouraging positive interaction with their Read-Aloud peers increases prosocial bonding. Meeting weekly throughout the year creates a community of readers that cares for and supports each other. This social aspect of the Read-Aloud experience helps kids feel connected to other readers in their neighborhood and to the reading community at large.

The hour each week that TRC kids spend at a Read-Aloud supports their growth as readers and provides them with a positive, consistent, engaging environment that fosters their resilience. Reading with volunteers provides a healthy escape from stress and creates a supportive, caring community that the kids can count on. TRC's Read-Aloud program helps kids become frequent and passionate readers, but it also does so much more in the process.

Nan Henderson, Havens of Resilience, Educational Leadership September 2013, Vol. 71 No. 1, pp. 23-27.

Jan Moore,  Resilience and At-Risk Children and Youth, National Center for Homeless Education, April 2013.

To receive credit for this online training, please fill out the form here.

Now boarding on platform 9 3/4...

Have you ever used a manual typewriter? Have you ever seen a tumbleweed or a coal chute? If you haven’t, it would be hard to understand some of our favorite Read-Aloud books:  Click Clack Moo:  Cows That Type by Doreen Cronin, Harry the Dirty Dog by Gene Zion and Tumbleweed Stew by Susan Stevens Crummel.

To help kids get the most out of books you are reading aloud with them, it’s a good idea to read through the books, looking for words or situations with which the kids might be unfamiliar. Sometimes words or concepts will be unfamiliar because they are old fashioned—like manual typewriters or coal chutes. Sometimes geography (take tumbleweeds for instance) or simply opportunity will be the factor preventing understanding. 

This kind of broad vocabulary and life experience is called background knowledge, and it is crucial to reading comprehension. It is your job, as an experienced person and reader, to look for stumbling blocks to understanding in the books you've chosen, and think of ways to remove those blocks for the kids. Here’s an example:

King's Cross Station

In Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, Harry is supposed to take a train to his new school, Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. He instructed to go to King’s Cross train station where the Hogwarts Express, his train, will be waiting at Platform 9 ¾. If you've never ridden on a train, like an AMTRAK train, the idea of a platform for a train might not make any sense. After all, a platform can be a stage or a shoe or a political thing, too. And the fanciful idea that there could be a train platform 9 ¾ would be lost on the kids.  How can there be a 3/4ths kind of place?

If you were reading that passage to the kids, you’d need to stop and talk about train stations and platforms. You could ask “What is a platform?”  “How do you think Harry will find his train?” It might even help to have some pictures to show the kids. (Google Images is your friend.) 

In addition to explaining what a word means, it also helps to make a connection between the new word or idea and the kids’ experience. For example, you could say, “Have you ever ridden on the metro or on a subway? The place where you stand and wait to get on the train is the platform.” And then you could talk about how they might have figured out which train to take when they were standing on the platform. That kind of connection helps kids apply their new vocabulary word or experience not only to the current story you are reading with them, but also in other situations in their lives.

Sometimes when you are reading with kids, you'll stumble upon words or ideas they are unfamiliar with and you just need to take a minute to explore and explain. But it would be even better if you had a chance to prepare in advance, so take a minute when you are looking over books to read with kids and think about, not just how you might read it to them, but also how you can build their background knowledge.

 
To receive credit for this online training, please fill out the form here.

Asking open-ended questions

Conversations are all about give and take. One person asks and the other person answers. What is it about our questions and answers that causes some conversations to continue forever and causes others to stop dead in their tracks? The answer is largely the difference between open- and closed-ended questions. For example:

Adult: Did you do anything fun at school today?
Child: No.
Conversation over.

Adult: What did you do at recess today?
Child: I played on the monkey bars with Amelia and then we played tag with some of the other kids.
Now there are a lot of follow-up questions and different directions you could take this conversation.

The difference between the questions is that the first was a closed-ended question and the second was open-ended. The difference lies in the way a question can be answered. Closed-ended questions can usually be answered with one or two words while open-ended questions require some elaboration. Sometimes, you can follow a closed-ended question with an open-ended one to keep the conversation going.

Adult: Which animal at the zoo is your favorite?
Child: The white tiger.
Adult: What is it about the white tiger that makes it special to you?
Child: I like that he's white and not like the rest of the tigers. Also it reminds me of Aladdin and I like his exhibit.

The beauty of open-ended questions is that they engage kids' thought processes, vocabulary and cognitive skills. They are great in personal conversations, but also fit perfectly into a discussion about a book. When open-ended questions are used with books, they encourage kids to use their imagination to extrapolate what's not shown and help them to understand different viewpoints. 

Some great open-ended questions to use in reading are

• What do you think this book is going to be about?
• What makes you think that?
• Why do you think he did that?
• How do you think that makes her feel?
• How would you feel if that happened to you?
• What would happen if this happened in real life?

For more information about open-ended questions, check out Stories and Children and a great list from Georgia's Department of Early Care and Learning. Also be sure to check out our post about talking with kids.

To receive credit for this online training, please fill out the form here.

Expanding vocabulary

The achievement gap between at-risk youth and advantaged youth usually begins even before children arrive at school. It often starts with a child's vocabulary. We are only able to comprehend and discuss concepts and issues for which we know the associated vocabulary. So, it is essential for kids to learn lots of new words all the time.

One of the best ways to learn new vocabulary is through reading. Picture books contain a lexicon at a much higher level than what a child can read on his or her own. For example, the picture book In the Small, Small Pond by Denise Fleming contains the text "waddle, wade geese parade" and "minnows scatter." A seven-year-old might not know exactly what minnows are or what waddle means, but she will be able to decipher their meanings from the images and the context. However, this deduction probably won't happen unless a discussion about the words is prompted by an adult.

Children usually skip over unknown words when reading, so when helping kids learn new vocabulary, take just a moment to point out a new word and then return to the flow of the story. Provide a short, kid-friendly definition and show how it relates to the picture (if possible). A short definition ensures the children understand the text and will hold their interest. Focus on words that are common in adult speech so the kids hear the words again. Hearing a new word one time won't make it stick, but repetition will. Encourage the children to name similar words or connect the new word to what they already know. For example, after reading about geese waddling in In the Small, Small Pond, ask the children what other animals waddle.

Show the kids how to use the pictures to their advantage while reading. This will go a long way in helping them when they have to read in later grades. Explain that looking at pictures is not cheating, but it's what they're there for.

For more strategies about improving kids' vocabulary while reading, check out Reading Rockets.


To receive credit for this online training, please fill out the form here.

Focus on the process, not the product

“All young children are great artists. The importance of their art is in the act of creating with confidence and in using their imaginations. It is our sacred trust not to take away this gift from our children, but to encourage and nurture it at every opportunity.” ~ Susan Striker, creator of the Anti-Coloring Books.

All too often when planning art activities for kids, we focus on the finished product and forget to leave room for kids' individuality in their creations. Providing a model for an activity is a good idea because it provides guidance, but it is always best to encourage the children to follow their whims. Some kids will take just a few minutes to add just a bit to what you give them. Others will add and add and add more and more materials. Some of the difference is a matter of age. Some kids just love to manipulate craft materials and use their fine-motor skills. 

We believe open-ended projects help build children's confidence in their skills and their individuality. It is important to praise equally those children who make elaborate extensions to the activity AND those who seem to engage only briefly. Who knows what elaborate extensions may be being built in the second child's imagination?

Open-ended activities work well for Read-Alouds because they are easily adaptable to wide age ranges. A four-year-old will enjoy these projects as much as an 11-year-old, but will likely produce a less ambitious product and spend less time at it. At a recent Read-Aloud at Next Steps Housing, the volunteers read Ten Black Dots by Donald Crews and gave each child dots with which to create an image of their choice. All of the kids, ranging from four to fourteen years old were thoroughly engaged in their creations and loved the freedom of the activity. 

Here are some open-ended ideas that could be adapted to fit a variety of themes.

From ID Mommy blog.

Collage.  Save or collect old magazines, catalogues and newspaper pages. Cut out pictures, paste them together on a sheet of construction paper to make a collage. Kids can create their favorite meal, if reading about food, or their ideal vacation spot, if talking about travel. Libraries often have old magazines for sale for $.25 each. You can also include nonpaper materials. For example, beans and rice, add so much to this farm scene.

Paper cutting. The classic example of paper cutting is making paper snowflakes. Show children how to fold the paper and where to cut so the finished product does not fall apart. Then give them the freedom to create snowflakes in different shapes and colors. Copy paper, tissue paper and coffee filters are great for this activity. 

Papel Picado is another great example of paper cutting. It's a traditional Mexican decoration that is easily adapted for kids. Fold colored tissue paper much like you would for a paper snowflake and cut out designs. These are often strung together to make colorful banners.

Clay and other manipulatives. Give each child some clay, play dough or pipe cleanesr and let her to create something related to what you've been reading. A team at Virginia Gardens last year let the kids create dinosaurs out of pipe cleaners. The kids were so proud of their creations. Have a look here:

Creating a scene. Provide each child with a piece of heavier stock paper as the base and a variety of materials to create a scene based on your theme. If creating a winter scene, provide cotton balls, glitter, pine needles, colored construction paper and stickers and let the kids create winter vistas.

When doing open-ended crafts, there is no "right" or "wrong" result, and it is finished when the child decides it is finished. The focus should be on the process of creating, not necessarily the end product. To spark conversation, ask each child to tell you about his art and what he used to create it. Let each child's personality and skills shine through their art.

For more ideas for open-ended crafts, read this pamphlet by 123child.com.



To receive credit for this online training, please fill out the form here.

How to Talk with Kids

For volunteers, interacting with kids at Read-Alouds can be intimidating. Children are interested in different things than adults, their social skills aren't yet totally developed, they might not like the books or activities that are being shared with them, and it might prompt them to act out. Furthermore, the kids at TRC Read-Alouds can be even more difficult to interact with since children in unstable family situations--the very demographic TRC works with--can be particularly fidgety, distracted, and hard to engage. But kids are just people, and they want to be treated respectfully and taken seriously. This blog entry will present some ideas on how to connect with kids in conversation, earn their respect and trust, and help engage them in the Read-Aloud.

1. Before the Read-Aloud, engage children in conversation to make them feel welcome.

It's true that you may have different interests, conversational styles and backgrounds than the children you're interacting with, and this might make conversation different--but can't those things be true of anybody? Volunteers should always arrive 15 minutes early for a Read-Aloud to get set up, and part of getting ready is to help make the kids feel welcome and excited. Do this by engaging a child in conversation the way you'd engage an adult who arrived to participate in a meeting or a workshop: ask how their day is going, what they've done that day, and then listen when they answer. Talk about what books they've read recently and if you've read something good, tell the kids about it (briefly). Welcome every child to the Read-Aloud individually, using his or her name.

2. Be aware of the child/adult power dynamic--because you can be sure that the kids are!

Children don't need to be treated like a bomb that could go off at any minute or a wild animal that needs to be lured into sitting still to listen to a storybook! Take care to treat every child as your equal—ask questions that you might ask to a friend and respond to their stories the way you would reply to anyone. Don't dumb down a conversation because you're talking to a 7 year old, just be aware of what conversation topics will interest and engage them.



3. Maintain a respectful disposition towards children who are acting out.

Of course there are times when kids are acting out or talking during a story or distracting their peers, and in those instances it is appropriate for a volunteer to exercise power as an authority figure. If this happens, be sure that in your response you remain calm and gracious. One easy way to do this is to cite the TRC promises that you reviewed at the beginning of your Read-Aloud. Many kids at Read-Alouds are familiar with the language of TRC's promises.

To the child who is talking out during the story, say, "We all promised to respect and listen to one another. Can you be respectful while I am reading?"

To the child who is distracting another child by talking to or physically bothering him or her, say, "I really need your cooperation if we're going to all have fun at the Read-Aloud."

If a child really can't cooperate, respect and listen at a Read-Aloud, have a volunteer pull him or her aside and say, "I really enjoy having you at Read-Alouds and I would hate for you to have to leave. But if you're not ready to be at the Read-Aloud right now, then it's time for you to go home and I'll have to see you next time. Do you think you are ready to be part of our Read-Aloud?"

The key is to emphasize that while certain behaviors are not welcome at Read-Alouds, all children are.

4. Remember that you also promised to Listen, Respect, Cooperate and Have Fun!

It's hard to blame a kid for acting out towards an adult who treats him or her like, well, a kid. Nobody likes to be condescended to or patronized (even by someone the same age as their parent!) As a Read-Aloud volunteer, it's your job to:

Listen to what the children are saying about the books and activities. If they say they don't like one or are bored, ask what kinds of things they would rather read about and what kinds of activities they'd rather do--and then listen to their answers!

Respect their contributions. Just because a kid's story is long and rambling and seems to make no sense, bear with him or her--you might be one of the only people who does. If a child has a problem that seems unimportant--a scab, or trouble sitting still--remember times that you had something distracting you from work or whatever you needed to be doing, and do what you can within reason to help the child solve his or her problem.

Cooperate. If a kid wants to take home a give-away book that is too advanced, reach a compromise: sit him or her down and read the first few pages out loud before letting the child take it home! If a kid's approach to a craft isn't what you had in mind but isn't disruptive or problematic, why not just let him or her go in whatever direction inspiration takes?

Have fun! Don't let kids stress you out! Do your best as a volunteer to listen to, respect and cooperate with the kids at your Read-Aloud, and you will probably do great! Children are sometimes less guarded and more genuine than grown-ups, which should make them easier to talk to.

Post by The Reading Connection intern Anna McCormally.


To receive credit for this online training, please fill out the form here.