“I need to read 100 books this year,” our daughter declared at the start of her kindergarten year.
At first, I thought this was a misunderstanding, but it wasn’t.
Our local elementary school uses the Accelerated Reader (AR) program. They count books read. They check the levels and log them. Reading is an exercise in statistical goals, extrinsic motivations like bar charts with stars.
I’m not a fan of the AR model and question the use of equations to measure actual reading levels. It doesn’t require a degree in English education to recognize that calculating reading levels does not align with the conceptual difficulty of a book. The AR program from Renaissance Learning has models for sentence complexity and comprehension complexity, but neither is ideal.
Used properly, and rarely, reading and writing levels provide diagnostic tools for educators and specialists. Used daily in school, however, this become weighty evidence to a child of how good he or she is at reading and writing.
Count the books. Make sure the books are the “right” levels. Take tests on those books. Log everything.
Reading should be fun. For me, reading naturally flowed into a desire to write. Writing should be fun.
Schools (from kindergarten through graduate school) seem intent on killing any innate love for reading and they make writing a chore based on formulaic models.
We want our daughters to love words. We want them to look forward to what happens next, eager to turn the pages of books, without counting the pages and stopping when a goal is met.
The girls see us reading and writing almost daily. At night, Mommy and Daddy read books (physical or digital) and we both write during the day for our careers. They know people read what we write.
Recently, our six-year-old has been making books. I showed her the books Daddy made in school. Being able to see that Daddy made books out of paper, staples, and duct tape was an exciting revelation. We had something in common!
The girls want to maintain reading logs, right now, and they know Mommy and Daddy use Goodreads and Bookends to track our books. We do not log books to count or to compete, but to tracks what we like and why. I’m worried that our logs might lead the girls astray, so we must remind them that we’re not competing for numbers.
Kindergarten has changed from the 1970s and 80s. We didn’t have reading logs in kindergarten. Nor did we bring home math homework labeled algebra. Common core math sheets requiring kindergarten students do algebra seems like overkill to me. No matter so many people grow up to hate learning.
I understand schools need metrics and goals, but we don’t need such nonsense in kindergarten. If learning doesn’t begin as a fun experience, it seldom becomes fun.
Read to children. Have fun. Apparently, we need to work against the school system models for reading and writing. I’m not just a parent saying this. I do have several degrees in English and language arts instruction and am familiar with the research on pedagogy. No study supports sucking the joy out of reading.
If your school uses AR, keep in mind that AR is convenient for schools, not necessarily effective instructional technique.