I'm going back to first grade," I told my department head at Utah State University as I explained why I needed a year off. I had accepted a one-year assignment at Wilson Elementary, a public school in Logan, Utah, in hopes of getting some up-to-date practical experience with beginning readers and, further, developing a balanced program for beginning readers, blending instructional methods from skills-based and holistic perspectives.
My request set into motion what proved to be a most rewarding—and physically exhausting—professional experience that has reinvigorated my university teaching and scholarship.
A Recognized Need for Balance
Increasingly, teaching professionals are recognizing the need to blend aspects of multiple instructional models (Adams 1990a, Anderson et al. 1985, McIntyre and Pressley 1996, Baumann 1997, Pressley et al. 1995). Duffy (1997, p. 359) suggests that teachers must create "coherent combinations" of many instructional models. Spiegel (1992) argues that skills-based and holistic instruction "can be blended in ways that strengthen both approaches" (p. 44). Adams (1990b) found that systematic code instruction included with the reading of connected text resulted in "superior reading achievement overall for both low-readiness and better prepared students" (p. 125).
With these ideas in mind, I began a five-part reading and writing instruction program: reading aloud to my students, sustained silent reading, decoding instruction, shared reading, and writing workshops. Each morning, I'd get to class well before 9:15, ready to begin six hours of rewarding teaching.
Wilson Elementary is housed in an old red brick building with four portable classrooms in back and serves students from a variety of economic backgrounds. Thirty-five percent of my students were eligible for free or reduced-price lunches.
Teaching Decoding Skills
My decoding instruction followed teacher read-aloud, singing time, and sustained silent reading each morning. I began the year teaching phonemic awareness concepts and the blending of consonant-vowel-consonant words. We progressed to short-vowel words with consonant blends and digraphs, then to long-vowel words with silent e and vowel teams. Later we focused on words with diphthongs, other common endings (Adams 1990a), contractions, compound words, and words with affixes. I felt most comfortable teaching the decoding skills both in a flexible sequence and spontaneously, as they appeared in the stories we read.
I followed a three-part instructional sequence for each decoding concept: introduce, explore, apply.
I introduced the decoding concepts to the students using word family charts I prepared: explaining how the letters worked together, reading the words to the students, and then inviting the class to read the charts with me.
We explored the concepts through follow-up decoding games and activities. We used the word families in bingo, baseball, and concentration games and word races—writing and erasing on the chalkboard. I often gave backward spelling tests. (The first sound is b-b-b. The second sound is a-a-a. The third sound is t-t-t.) The children would write the letters on their papers, then shout the word out practically in unison.
I met with struggling students individually for about 10 minutes each day so they could practice a page or two of sentences containing words with high-frequency phonics. It wasn't literature, but this repeated practice with common spelling patterns was effective. I helped them until it became easy. Once they knew one page, we moved on to the next. I saw excitement in their young faces. Some of my most gratifying moments came when students successfully pronounced new and unfamiliar words.
The class would apply my decoding instruction each day during shared reading time. At the beginning of the year, we read aloud together from big books, following up with sentence and word-matching activities.
Shared Reading
I soon felt an acute need to find something more substantial than big books for our shared reading. So I wrote, on chart paper, condensed versions (about 200 words) of popular fairy tales and some of the read-aloud books the children enjoyed most.
I hung these chart stories on a classroom wall and introduced each one by reading the first one or two sentences aloud, then inviting the children to read the sentences along with me. Then I would call on certain groupings of children, identified in various ways: "Those in front. . ." "In the back row. . ." "Boys. . ." "Girls. . ." "Those of you who are wearing blue. . . ." After looking for and finding decoding words on the story charts, the students underlined them. The charts quickly became filled with underlined familiar word parts.
Finding these decoding words was the tangible link between our decoding lessons and their reading of connected text. They would study the sentences on a chart, raise their hands, and say something like: "In sentence seven, the word 'main' has a vowel team in it." It was very rewarding to watch them become word analyzers, able to identify letter patterns in printed words. Children frequently, excitedly, showed me decoding words in other classroom print, including books used in sustained silent reading, song lyrics, and the nametags taped to their desks.
Daily shared reading concluded with the students back in their seats, reading and illustrating individual booklet copies I had made for them. As they colored, I went from desk to desk to listen to students read the story to me, by themselves and with a partner.
Writing Time
Writing time was an important opportunity for the students to apply decoding skills in a personal and meaningful context. It began each morning with a 10-minute minilesson. With the overhead projector, I demonstrated writing techniques in children's literature, including description, character development, dialogue, beginnings and endings, and revision. Students regularly incorporated minilesson topics into their writing. One morning, for a lesson on descriptive writing, I used Beatrix Potter's story of Squirrel Nutkin behaving disrespectfully toward Old Brown, the owl (Potter 1978). Shortly afterward, in a writing conference, a student showed and read to me: "I HaV a Bruthr That is impertinent." She so loved that big word that she borrowed the book and copied it—correctly—into her story.
After each minilesson, the class did 10 minutes of silent writing. Everyone, including myself, selected a topic and wrote about it in a personal folder. I kept a large supply of writing paper in a basket on a back table. Most students kept extra sheets in their writing folders.
The heart of the writing program was the writing workshop (Atwell 1987, Avery 1993). For 30 minutes, the students were free to write alone at their seats, confer with me or a parent volunteer, read and write with a partner, type a story on the class computer, or illustrate their latest original book. During this time, I met with students individually to discuss meaning and mechanics. One day, two students told me they wanted to write a book about dogs. I sent them to the media center with a written request for the staff to help them locate some dog books. These two children spent the next several days researching, selecting information, writing, and eventually publishing their book Different Dogs.
Publishing students' original books was the highlight of my reading and writing program. The books ranged from 10 to 20 printed or illustrated pages and included an author information page. When children finished the illustrations, I laminated the front and back covers and bound the books. "Today we will get to hear two of the newest books in the whole world," I would announce to an excited class. Later that morning, the proud authors sat center stage in the author's chair—an old, brown, overstuffed but distinctive-looking chair that came from a thrift shop—and read their book, always receiving an enthusiastic ovation.
During writing time, the children would refer to a word wall, an idea suggested by Cunningham and colleagues (1995). I wrote the students' names on 3-by-5 index cards and taped them in alphabetical order on butcher paper across the back wall of the classroom. Below each student's name, I added words that the students frequently misspelled. To encourage the class to use the word wall, I sometimes used those words for games, choral reading activities, and spelling tests.
Each day, after the writing workshop, the class gathered around the author's chair, from which about five students would take turns reading their stories-in-progress and get feedback from classmates.
A Balanced Assessment
My assessment reflected both the skills-based and holistic emphases that I tried to blend in my program. On the first day of school, the parent volunteers administered an informal reading test to gauge students' ability to identify the names and sounds of the letters of the alphabet, words from lists of phonetically regular words, and sight words. About half the children could recognize all of the letters of the alphabet and read some words. We used the sight word list again in January and in May as one measure of students' growth in reading.
Each day, I invited four or five students to bring their sustained silent reading books of their choice to my desk for an individual conference. After reading aloud, they expressed their thoughts on the book and its setting, characters, plot, and theme. I jotted notes on each student's fluency, comprehension, and attitude; kept the notes in the students' files; and referred back to them often in order to note growth and to determine areas for instruction.
Like Learning Music
My wife and I have five children, all of whom play the piano. They begin their daily practice sessions with technique drills, playing scales and arpeggios up and down the keyboard for about 10 minutes, and then play Chopin, Haydn, and Rachmaninoff. The technique drills are definitely not music, but they enable learners to play music. As the fingering patterns have become automatic, my children have learned to play music by many composers and in many keys. Repetition is essential; the young pianists regularly spend weeks and months learning a piece of music.
Likewise, instruction and practice in decoding skills are definitely not reading, but they enable reading. As recognition and manipulation of spelling patterns become automatic, students can read Chris Van Allsberg, Don and Audrey Woods, Lois Lowry, and Gary Paulsen. The repetition in shared reading allows students regular opportunities to encounter common spelling patterns in a variety of meaningful contexts.
My attempt to blend skills and holistic instruction methods was successful. At the end of the year, by my informal assessment, 18 of the children in my 1st grade class were reading at 2nd grade level or above, three were at 1st grade level, and only two were on the primer level. Much of their success must be attributed to the sheer volume of words they encountered each day, as predicted by Allington (1980). My students were involved, almost nonstop, with words: hearing, reading, and studying words; sharing and playing with words; singing and dramatizing words; and writing and illustrating words.
Choosing the books they read and the topics they wrote about helped them claim ownership of their emerging literacy. The many enrichment activities enhanced and extended the students'experience with the literature. Participating in readers' theaters, making murals of favorite books, staging puppet shows with stuffed animals, making videotaped versions of favorite books, and publishing classroom versions of favorite stories and content-area books kept the students actively and meaningfully involved in the reading and writing process.
It was gratifying to see how the five parts of the program complemented one another. Teacher read-alouds provided important background knowledge, vocabulary, and enthusiasm. Sustained silent reading gave students a daily opportunity to practice and apply reading skills. Decoding instruction helped them to read on their own and with the class. Shared reading also gave students an opportunity to apply reading skills to large amounts of connected text. Writing time demonstrated the purposes of literacy and helped them feel comfortable and active in our literate classroom.
