Admittedly my first year teaching kindergarten, even as a seasoned teacher, was challenging! In fact, I think “challenging” is an understatement. I had 25 kids, a small classroom and the children were all over the place academically. Some were well prepared while others barely knew their first and last names. It was tough!
I decided to go through the Nursery Rhymes the first days of kindergarten. One little boy , named Juan, got up and stamped off into the corner of the room.
“I don’t want to do that, that’s boring!” he shouted.
“Excuse me?” I questioned
. “That’s boring! I know all those rhymes!”
“Really?” I doubted,
“So tell us them!”
To my surprise this child knew every single nursery rhyme I was to cover and more!
. “There, I know all that already!” he pouted.
“Well,” I probed, “Do you know how to read?” Honestly, I was hoping he didn’t because what was I going to do with him if he knew how to read? 🙂
“No, I can’t read.”
“Well, good because this year I am going to teach you how to read!”
I was relieved!
“Now will you come back here and be a good boy and just work with the class on nursery rhymes?”
“Ok.” Juan smiled.
The class was difficult, in fact, I had to ask the principal for a helper else I feared I wouldn’t get anything done! The helper joined me and she was incredible. There was no more nonsense and we got down to business. I had three reading groups, Juan was in my top group and he was the top of that group. He completed the Sing, Spell, Read & Write First Grade program!
At the end of the year I decided to see if he could read the Declaration of Independence. I just wanted to see if his word attack skills were as good as I thought. Obviously he would have needed some background information and some work with this document to really comprehend it, but I was just looking for his decoding skills here.
Here is it:
Juan tested out of our school and into the Gifted and Talented schools. By 5th or 6th grade he was solicited by the movie industry to write reviews for their children’s movies.
🙂
