After all these years of trying to get better at comprehension based instruction, I have come to realize that the best kind of reading is not novels. It is the readings we create from the stories we build in class with the kids. Step 3 readings are far superior to novels in many ways:
- They have much more direct interest to the kids because the kids literally made them up, acted in them, and created all the details pertinent to their own class. As such, Step 3 stories are far more personalized than novels.
- It is possible for the teacher to create all sorts of levels of embedded readings in stories – this is not possible in novels.
- Novels fade in interest, stories are newly created each week.
- Stories are much shorter than novels, alleviating the crushingly boring plot problem we find in some of the novels we have available to us.
When writing up readings at home for the kids (which is about the only night I bring CI work home if I can’t get it done during planning), I find myself smiling a lot. As I write up what happened in Step 2, I can’t help but think of the story we did, the acting, the laughs, the silly things, and then, when writing up the story (handed to me at the end of class by the Story Writer) it is very easy to just keep the fun going by expanding and embedding new funny stuff into the story for the kids to laugh at the next day.
A well written reading from a story can actually be fun to do.
