How to Read a Book (A Study in Four Parts): Nov. 21, 2007
Originally uploaded by cmt2779
Recently I was asked to give a two-minute presentation to the staff on creating a print-rich environment. This I did happily. I might have gone a few seconds over, but considering I could have talked for three days about it, I guess I did okay.
The “print-rich environment” concept is usually tied to emergent literacy and early childhood classrooms. You go into preschool, Headstart, and even church nursery classrooms and see sentence-strip cards on everything: “shelf,” “books,” “plant,”"window,” etc. Days of the week, color words, weather words, and students’ names are all around. This is done to reinforce the concept that everything has a name, and that names can be written in print.
In preschool, it’s great. There’s lots of research to support the concept and lots of examples of how-to. In high school, however, the teachers take a bit of convincing, and it’s harder to find supporting research. Many of our teachers do not come from an elementary school background, and they will tell you they chose high school because they didn’t want to babysit or do cutesy Mickey-Mouse stuff.
I went to the reading gurus, Stephen Krashen and Jim Trelease, for guidance. I had heard Mr. Trelease speak recently, and was struck with one piece of a study in particular. In The Read-Aloud Handbook, Trelease points to a strong correlation between poverty and illiteracy, and between illiteracy and prison populations. When he spoke recently, he showed a Krashen study in California which counted the number of books owned by families in the communities of Beverly Hills, Watts, and Compton.
I’ve seen variations on this theme, but this is the most dramatic. The average Beverly Hills household has 199 books. In Compton, it’s 2.7 books. In Watts, it’s .4. Yes, four tenths of a book.
The point is, in order to become readers, one must have something to read. Students from backgrounds of poverty do not have much material upon which to practice reading. Even at the high school level, we can do a little something to remedy this.
I expected the indifference of callous sophisticates among all but the English teachers. Yet several of the teachers actually have been receptive. I’ve been happily pulling dozens of books for science and history classroom reading centers. I imagine students in the back of the class sniffing them the way they did in Dangerous Minds (1995), but eventually coming around.
In the meantime, the library is looking rich with this fall’s new books added, as many covers face out as possible, new signage around the place, student art displayed on the walls, and new book carts for impromptu displays. Hooray print!
