Reading Archive

I finished my Reading Archive project this weekend, and I was just thinking about how important it was to complete an exercise like that before going into the classroom as a REAL teacher. Looking at my history as a reader and how that has shaped my life really made me think about how I am going to approach the teaching of reading next Fall. I accidentally read through Chapter 3 in Wilhelm instead of 4, so I got the whole section on the SRI, with which I am familiar, and I really think that is a great way to do this project with students in middle or high school. The evidence Wilhelm shows to support the use of the SRI is astounding; 1/3 of his students revealed things about themselves as readers in a way that surprised and delighted him. I know I would have rather done one that written a five page paper (no offense Sara!) because it would have been fun, and almost more challenging to come up with symbolic ways to demonstrate the sections of the assignment. I am a lover of collage work, and find it almost therapeutic to spend hours digging through stuff until I come up with the best combination of materials, one that fits my vision for the project. I used this approach in my Methods course to complete an SRI recently, and had such a great time doing it that I nearly finished it in one sitting.
I am interested to see what others in the class thought about the project, whether they liked doing it, and whether they made the same sort of connections I did with my teaching. I think it will be beneficial in many ways to have students do something like this because it will allow me to know how to help each student read in a way that allows them to enjoy themselves, and to comprehend, explore, and make connections within the reading. Literacy and the struggle with reading is a huge issue at the High School at which I want to teach, and I am looking forward to learning new ways to help the students I hope to teach in the future. I am already working in a classroom with a teacher who runs a special program for students who are not reading at grade level, and I have seen how much they want to improve already, in the short time I have been there. I catch glimpses of them working very diligently to reach new goals that they have set for themselves, and how disappointed they are when they have to try again. I have helped to test them on their work, to explain new techniques and exercises for moving them to a new level of reading, and it has been so rewarding. It takes a lot of extra energy to boost those kids up, but they really need someone to do that, in the worst way. I think that helping them to self-assess, which is what this Reading Archive project helped me to do, would be a springboard to making those necessary changes in their reading habits.