Point to the design of the building when reading. Don’t stop and dwell on single bricks but point on and then on again to the next sentence, and then do that again with the sentence after that and keep on going. Turn it all into a film in their minds, so they can’t possibly focus on the individual pieces of the building even if they wanted to. Get the flow of it going in your classroom.*
The deeper mind of the student – that place where language lives – doesn’t need to know the name of each brick, just what they look like when they all fit together in speech. Do you need to know the parts of speech being used in this sentence to understand it? No, silly!
In this way, through reading, your students will learn not only the language but also its grammar system as well. Remember, also, that the mortar we now use in reading, as mentioned here a few days ago, is the mortar of SLOW repeated input in the form of listening and reading, a mortar that is best poured out of bags stamped with the phrase “most effective when personalized” on them.
The personalization bag does the best job of holding the bricks together. When the kids read or listen to PQA or a story that is held together with personalized content, then they are more interested in it. They see it as their house. And it is!
*This way of reading, of creating a film in their minds, is the way Susie Gross advocates that we read novels on her site (susangrosstprs.com). So we need to be clear that in the above Brick House 10 blog text I am describing that way of teaching reading to kids. The other way, of course, is where we do readings created from stories, as per Step 3 of TPRS. So just to be clear, there are those two ways to read, Susie’s where you plow through the novel in a few weeks kind of non-stop to get the film going in their heads, and Blaine’s where you stop and get a closer look at the structure of the reading than in the “fim version” after each story in the form of the reading. Both are equally valid ways to read with our kids, of course, along, of course, with the third kind of reading advocated in TPRS, Free Voluntary Reading (Krashen). We don’t want to say that any one way is “better” or more effective than another. All three have their relative merits and arguments can be made but who cares about that? I do all three with my students and they are all very very effective tools for reading – in my view, doing all three brings the variety in reading; we can do three or four novels a year (Susie), a ton of readings as described as our W/Th activities in my new weekly schedule (Blaine – see the category called “Weekly Schedule New (2011)” below right here for details) and the one that we never can find enough time to do – FVR. One thing about what we do in CI – we never have enough time. When I think of the suffering of being in the middle of a class and it felt like not 25 but 70 or 80 minutes remained in the 52 minute class and I was using English to teach French (think about that) and I didn’t know what I was going to do just to make it to the end of class and I hated teaching, I am very happy now to have met and been trained by these great leaders – Susie, Blaine and Stephen Krashen. It is because of their ideas that I love to teach now. Thank you, you three whose eagle like vision has helped so many of us grow deeper into real teaching!