Getting the Feel of Reading

For my second time of giving my time to Vallejo Mill's reading program I felt like I had more of an impact on my the student that I was assigned to help read.  This time he had an issue with another student that was harassing him because of how he kicked a ball in kickball.  He was too afraid to go and tell a teacher so we had a conversation and he asked me if I could go tell a teacher.  I told the lady that gave him a hard time when he went to the bathroom and she said "They were probably jokingly teasing, children do it all the time."  At this point I knew she was clueless when it came to children so I went to the man in charge, John Santonastaso and he had a talk with the other boys that were harassing him and made them apologize.  It was nice to see how much this child has grown to trust me in only 1.5 hours.

I was helping my student read and I saw a noticeable change in his reading behaviors.  So I asked him what happened, because before he would constantly check the clock and ask me how much time we had left.  Sometimes when we would clean up and put everything away he would just run out.  This time however he never looked at the clock and I was so excited to see how much his interest for reading has gone.  He was a very good reader but he sometimes mixed up words that were only missing a letter like ‘that’ and ‘what’ but after making flashcards and vigorously training him to not make those mistakes, he learned in 10 minutes.

I had soon realized that he enjoyed playing these sentence games that we played with another pair of readers.  The games involved seeing flashcards that we were told they should know before the end of the Reading Clinic.  I made restrictions on the sentences to make them more challenged so they could progress more.  The sentences had to be at least 8 words long with a maximum of 12 with no adding random words at the end of the sentences.  The 2^nd grader that was participating was one of his friends and it reminded me of when I was in 2^nd and 3^rd grade having friends and playing games together during recess.  Mr. Santonastaso hit the bell on his desk which meant it was time to go and my student looked at me and said “Already?  I was having so much fun!”  I knew that, at this point, I had made him enjoy reading and I enjoyed being the one to help him progress in his reading capabilities.

Mr. Santonastaso and Me