Teaching With Common Core Aligned Books and Ignoring the Questions of Children
Common Core aligned books and the drill to teach reading to young children, appears to ignore the real questions children might have about the stories they read. This could be serious, especially if the book is beyond a child’s development. If the teacher is forced to address things like syntax, story order, and facts surrounding the characters and the word meaning, but never asks the child how they interpret the story, it could cause a lot of problems surrounding reading development. It could also cause a child to become confused, fearful, even dislike reading altogether.
The missing piece of the puzzle is that no one asks the children how they feel about what they read or what they think about what they read. This no longer matters in the cold, mechanistic style of measurable educating and in this case with reading instruction. We are hearkening back to the cold 1940s (close reading) schooling and calling it progress. Like everything else with Common Core, there are right answers and that’s it. There is no room for interpretation.
For example, the Federalist recently provided an interesting example of teachers learning about this new kind of reading instruction. Here they were learning to teach the Common Core English Language Arts (See Here). The book the teachers were using to teach second grade summer school students, students who were having difficulty with reading already, was Eve Bunting’s Pop’s Bridge. Bunting is known for her gritty books, rich and provocative, like Smokey Night which deals with rioting, orFlyaway Home where a father and son live in an airport because they are homeless.Terrible Things is her book about the Holocaust with the message that people should Teaching With Common Core Aligned Books and Ignoring the Questions of Children: