Read to the Pig for Read Across America Day

Answer: In honor of Dr. Seuss's birthday and Read Across America Day, the Burlingame Reading Clinic will have a Read to the Pig event on Saturday, March 1. There will be a number of animals, and kids will have a chance to read to a pig and get a certificate for participating in Read Across America Day. All children and adults are welcome to read to the pig.

Activating Schema for Recall and Understanding

One of the speakers I saw a few weeks ago at the Learning and the Brain Conference was Larry Cahill, a professor of neurobiology and behavior at UC Irvine. He made some important points about memory and emotion that relate directly to what we do. We are not, he noted, "passive video recorders." Memory is an "active, constructive" process.

One of Cahill's students conducted a study in which participants were introduced to new information and concepts. Following this introduction, one group was asked to plunge their hands into ice water, while another was not. Then, after an interval of several weeks, both groups were questioned about the information and concepts. The "ice water" group did better.

Now, I am not proposing that we dunk our students' hands into ice water following the discovery of new concepts, but I do believe this is a demonstration of something of which we are all probably aware. Making an emotional connection to content etches that content more firmly in memory. Not a bad thing to think about with VV students.

One fourth grader at our clinic had been reading the first in the excellent Shredderman series by Wendelin Van Draanen. He's a bouncy guy who still has some difficulty with sentence by sentence work below his grade level. I had thought this relatively straightforward book with its realistic and comic portrayals of the trials and tribulations of elementary school would appeal to him, but I despaired as I read the clinical notes in his binder.

Observations such as "missing key elements in story" and "poor recall" indicated that this student was not having success with this book. I think it's really important for VV students to work contextually, but it was disappointing that it didn't seem to be working here.

I found an opportunity to work with him myself. Instead of asking him what the book was about, or to tell me the story so far, I began talking about Bubba, a character in the book.

"You know, when I was in school, there always seemed to be one or two kids like Bubba. I could never understand what the deal is with guys like that. Why do they act that way?"

My student leapt in. "Yeah, guys like that are mean for no reason."

I had not told him that Bubba was a bully, but he knew. We went on to have a conversation about bullies in general, bullies at his school, and most significantly, considering the clinical notes I'd been reading, the things Bubba did in Shredderman that were clear manifestations of bulliness. It turned out this boy had a fairly clear understanding of the novel, but could not be reached when asked to demonstrate that understanding by listing plot elements or characters.

It was an emotional connection that unlocked his memory and opened up expression of his understanding.

Kristin Powell has asked us to watch the Reading Rockets video on comprehension, "Making Reading Count," in which panel members including Nanci Bell talk about strategies for better understanding. One way to remember such strategies mentioned by Sharon Walpole, a professor of education at the University of Delaware, was using the acronym PICTURE. The "I," or course, stands for "imagine—visualize, create a mental image." That we are all familiar with.

The "U" is for "use" as in "use what you know—background knowledge." Looking at the video and reading recognized works on teaching comprehension, like Strategies That Work and Mosaic of Understanding, have pushed me to think about what we can do before, during and after visualizing and verbalizing to enhance that process.

Certainly one possibility is using what the student knows. Since emotion forms memory, we should tap into the student's personal emotional memories. This is what is called "making text to self connections" in Strategies That Work and "activating schema" in Mosaic of Understanding.

With this concept—"activating schema"—I'll bring us back to Larry Cahill's lecture. As I read Mosaic of Thought, I wondered where that terminology came from. Cahill went into the beginnings of the idea that memory is connected to emotion, referring to a short story called "The War of the Ghosts," which psychologists use to explore how emotional response powers memory.

This Native American tale was first used by British psychologist Frederic Bartlett early in the twentieth century. He asked people to read the unfamiliar story, then to retell it at a later time. He found that readers changed the story so that it fit it into what they already knew. The revised version was what they remembered. Bartlett put forth the hypothesis (still influential after nearly a century) that we use "schema"—cultural and historical contextualization—to remember and understand.

When we work with students on understanding through visualization, let's strengthen that imaging process by activating schema.

This area—strategies that surround what we do in VV, enhancing memory and comprehension—is one I intend to explore further.

Afterword: The entire acronym PICTURE is: P for predict, I for image, C for clarify, T for try (asking questions), U for use what you know, R for review, and E for evaluate.

Our new couch in the Saratoga clinic!

That's some good sittin' and ponderin'. (photo credit: Azania Baker)

Reading Daze

Read Across America, sponsored by National Education Association, takes place on Dr. Seuss's (Theodore Geisel) birthday. Sometimes schools look for people to read aloud, so perhaps this might be a good outreach for us. We could also give kids a certificate for participating.

Drop Everything and Read Day is also sponsored by the National Education Association along with the Parent Teacher Association, the Association for Library Service to Children (a division of the American Library Association), Reading Rockets, The General Federation of Women’s Clubs, the Newspaper Association of America Foundation, First Book, HarperCollins Children’s Books, and Ramona Quimby. As you might guess from the last sponsor, it takes place on Beverly Cleary's birthday. Let's start thinking about active participation in this one, too.

Read Across America Day: March 3, 2008

D.E.A.R. 4/12/08

"Drop Everything and Read" Day! 4/12/08

http://www.dropeverythingandread.com/

http://www.readingrockets.org/calendar/dear

ADHD and ME

I was really privileged to attend a book launch last Saturday for a new book called ADHD and Me: What I Learned From Lighting Fires at the Dinner Table by Blake E.S. Taylor. Blake is a freshman at UC Berkeley and wrote this book during his last two years of high school. It's a memoir that really shows what it's like to have ADHD from the student's perspective. He deals with bullies, confronts unfair teachers, struggles with distractions during tests, etc. He has useful tips of how to deal with each part of the condition and has a great and positive attitude. I will be getting a copy for all of the centers. It's great read for middle school (Serena read it) through professionals.