Two years ago, Diana finagled $400,000 from the district (we got $32 million from the Gates foundation) to supply every single WL teacher in DPS with a BIG, all levels library of at least 100 brand new FVR children’s books each. I know. It was like getting a brief visit to heaven.
That dollar amount looks like a misprint but it’s not. Diana doesn’t mess around. She knew the Gates money ($32M) was in her building looking for places to be spent and she wanted all of us to have a good FVR library and she made it happen.
Not all districts are that fortunate, however, and some readers of this blog have next to no resources for FVR. To remedy that situation, I propose the following:
Members of our PLC who want to send and can afford to part with used books that don’t belong to their districts or schools (books that they own themselves and just have laying around) can send one of those books to a specific person in our group.
The postage for those books, media mail, is usually under a dollar, and if the 80 people in our group were each to send one such book, the person on the receiving end would get an instant FVR library.
We can do this for one person at a time <em>per language</em>. And we shouldn’t limit the program to a certain time period, but just keep it going for one person until they are happy with their FVR library and then we can start sending them to the next person in that language group.
One of the reasons I am pushing this is that Krashen’s idea of people mailing used books to each other is brilliant – I just received two more from him, one an old French book on yoga and one a children’s book (I’m keeping the crappy sci-fi one he sent me).
But, more importantly, I feel that doing FVR for the first ten minutes of each class all year next year is something that could not represent a better use of time, and would lower our stress by 50 minutes per day. I really believe that FVR is a true powerhouse that most of us don’t respect for what it can really do for our students.
Here is an example of why I say that:
Yesterday, one of my lower achieving students had just spent ten minutes with a very simple book in which were the the sentences:
Le cheval part (the horse is leaving)
Les chevaux partent (the horses are leaving)
with really neat pictures. This prompted this student to tell me after the reading session, on his way to put back his book, that he got what the difference in every word he saw was all about. It was like he was proudly teaching me what the deal was in those two sentences. He said something like:
…the first word there means the and it is only one guy horse and the t on the end of leaves means there is only one horse. But, Mr. Slavic, look at the x on that word there. That means more than one. And see the s on the word the? That means that there is more than one horse. And see the nt? That’s the way you spell it when it’s more than one….
This is stuff I wanted to teach him, and I do point out things like this in reading classes, but in this case he had seen it, observed it, made it his own and explained it to me with pride.
[An aside: as per that recent thread on reading in the first year, I do believe in reading in the second half of the year in schools. My take away from that whole discussion is to do half the first semester with PQA and extending it, then in the second half of the first semester it’s always about making bad ass stories with bad ass readings from those stories, and then going to novels in the spring, about March, when books like Pauvre Anne are effortless for every kid in the room. Of course, FVR would be every day all year. This is just my plan for me – I’m not trying to put it on others.]
Back to the plan. We could call it the “FVR Instant Library Program”. Then each of us need only send just one book to the person whose library we are building, sending old children’s readers like the ones described above. It’s that simple. Let me know what y’all think about this idea.