The notion of not liking ELA, and reading especially, was completely foreign to me when I was in elementary school. Reading was fun, and everyone did it. At home, my mom and oldest sister Megan were always reading books for fun, and Emily, my other sister, would often read magazines or stuff on the internet. Friday nights were reading nights (when we got to read during dinnertime) at our house, as well as any night when my dad didn't make it home for dinner (yes, we ate dinner together every night - we were that type of family). We did word puzzles (I remember having rebus puzzle books and doing the Jumble in the newspaper) and got pretty competitive with them. Even our presents at Christmastime involved us having to solve puzzles and riddles to get to them (still do, in fact). At school, we had independent reading time all the time (called DEAR time when we were in the lower grades for "drop everything and read"), and we always got to pick whatever books we wanted to read. ELA classes were enjoyable because we did things like have readers' theaters, hold themed events related to the books we read (like a pioneer day when reading "Sarah, Plain and Tall"), write stories where we had lots of creative freedom, and play word games.
(This weird tangent has a point, I swear.)
Like I said, not liking reading just wasn't a thing when I was in elementary school. Nobody I knew (as far as I could tell) didn't like to read.
And then came middle school. And I got it then, why someone could dislike ELA.
Particularly, learning vocabulary.
Like all my fellow high-achieving nerd friends in middle school, I took an SAT prep vocabulary class during homeroom. I liked vocabulary. I remember doing vocabulary flashcards at dinner as a kid with my older sisters. I used to make my own flashcards with unfamiliar words from books I read. Learning words was fun.
That vocabulary class sucked the fun out of everything. Have you ever read a "novel" that force-feeds you vocabulary? Because that's what we did. I have managed to block out most of my experience with "The Marino Mission: One Girl, One Mission, One Thousand Words: 1,000 Need-To-Know SAT Vocabulary Words," but clearly, it still lingers in my consciousness.
All of this came back to me when I read Meaghan's post, "Vocabulary Development Can Be Fun?". Meaghan made a lot of important points in her post, and I'm going to be spending my time blessing them and sharing my own thoughts.
First, Meaghan writes,
"The idea that students can be learning, while also having fun, is such an important lesson for even myself to acknowledge. I think a lot of elementary and even middle school curriculums have this as a missing piece. The enthusiasm for learning is so crucial in order to reach kids, and keep them engaged, wanting to learn more" (Jackson, 2022).
Fun truly is too often missing from learning. I was blessed to have an elementary school that made learning enjoyable (I won't say I want to go back to those days, but I definitely want to go back to those days...). I think too many schools and teachers think you can do one or the other; you can have fun, or you can learn - you can't do both. I know that's not true because I had so much fun, and I learned so much in elementary school. My school definitely made us all believe reading was fun. Our teachers read aloud books all through elementary school. (I do really mean all the way through elementary school. My 5th grade teacher read aloud "The Hunger Games" to us. We didn't have to do any assignments with it. It was just for pleasure because our teacher knew it was about to be made into a movie that most of us wanted to see.) We looked forward to DEAR time because we could read whatever, no judgments or policing our books. If you wanted to read a picture book about something science-y, great. If you wanted to read that year's Golden Sowers, awesome. As long as you were reading and enjoying it, it didn't matter. The weekly trips to the library were looked forward to by all of us. It was an environment that fostered joy.
When I compare that to that vocabulary class, where reading was a chore, I feel so much luckier about what I had. I know my experience was an exception. But it shouldn't be. We were open to learning because we knew it was fun. So many students who struggle in the school environment, and I can't help but think that they wouldn't struggle as much if joy was considered an essential part of the curriculum. Gholdy Muhammad (2020) puts it beautifully:
"We should want to move beyond mere grades and test scores and make it our mission that when students leave our teachers and our schools, they not only earn strong grades and test scores, but they also embody a love and joy for reading and literacy - that they leave us and ascend to remote regions of the world while also discovering the power of their minds" (p. 169).
Meaghan ties this love of reading into vocabulary learning in particular. She writes,
"If children are engaged in what they are reading, find joy in it, and excited to learn about new vocabulary words they may come across because of that joy, I think that is success. Reading is essential in vocabulary growth, especially in the younger grades, [sic] therefore, the more time children spend reading (and enjoying what they are reading), the more successful they will be in reading comprehension and beyond" (Jackson, 2022).
This notion is backed by Tompkins (2017) at multiple points throughout the text. First, she backs the importance of reading in vocabulary growth, sharing that "reading is the single largest source of vocabulary growth in students, especially after third grade" (p. 243). That is huge. More than explicit instruction, reading is how students learn vocabulary. Clearly, then, you want to students to want to read. And as Meaghan wrote and Tompkins (2017) confirms,
It is all connected. Joy, reading, vocabulary development, and reading comprehension."Vocabulary knowledge and reading achievement are closely related: Students with larger vocabularies are more capable readers, and they know more strategies for figuring out the meanings of unfamiliar words than less capable readers do ... Capable readers get better because they read more, and the books they read are more challenging with academic vocabulary words" (p. 220).
Sarah, wow. This was such an intriguing entry. I still am wondering what exactly did your teacher ask you to read in your SAT prep vocabulary class? How were you encouraged to learn the words? And what was the "tenor" of the class? It sounds like part of the reason there was no joy was because the *pressure was on* to excel on a test. Is that right? If the only *motivation* or *thrill* for learning the words was to do well on a test, then I can certainly see why you were not at all able to strive for Muhammad's goals of "ascend[ing] to remote regions of the world while also discovering the power of their minds."
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