Tips For Making Kids Own Their New Reading Skills

The key aspects of Guided Reading are: Exploration, Self-discovery, Self-knowledge and Ownership. The teacher takes on the role of a guide, helping children to gain all four aspects personally.

This month, we are focusing on Ownership with practical tips to encourage it. Without ownership, learning can be uninspiring to children. They may see themselves as a blank slate that is being written on and end up tolerating their educational circumstances rather than thriving.

But ownership is in fact what makes us who we are individually. In order to be successful people, we adopt certain bits of knowledge or beliefs as our own. They can come from literature, teachers, parents, church leaders, community involvement and of course from the television and forms of media. Just because a child is bombarded with all manner of messages does not mean they adopt these beliefs. A child and indeed a person can only own so many beliefs and bits of knowledge. Some are thrown out immediately or some are ignored completely in favour of others. How do you as a classroom teacher inspire children to take greater ownership when it comes to literacy?

We have several suggestions.

Tip 1: Set the expectation of ownership up front.

Tell students up front that you expect them to take ownership of what they are learning. Set that down as an expectation. Discuss it as a class. Share your own experiences with owning bits of knowledge or perhaps talents and skills you've acquired.

Tip 2: Set the reasonable expectation of owning words by introducing a personal notebook.

Grant every child their own notebook. Assure them that it will not be looked at by anybody else but them and anyone they choose to show. Ask them to write their own words. Tell them to cut out words they like or copy words they want to know.

Last year, I taught a mother how to teach her child to read with Star Gazer's Guided Reading Kit. Alex (name changed) was in Senior Kindergarten and was completely uninspired by the learning in her classroom. I sat down with her over about six sessions and on the first day, I granted her a notebook. All year, she learned to read with her mother. She went through levels A to L with five stories in each level.

She explained to everybody that she was in charge of her notebook and only words that she liked would be entered in there. She 'owned the words' in the book.

This September, she has finished five notebooks and is writing all kinds of sentences.

Tip 3: Give out words as gifts.

Write twenty plus words on pieces of paper and hand out to the class as gifts. When they ask, help them sound out the words or tell them what they are.

Tip 4: Give every child a place on the word wall.

Save part of your wall space for each child's sentence of the week. All it takes is a piece of tape doubled over. Give each child direction in creating their sentence. Have them cut out the words and put up their own sentences. Intergrate this task with computers by having them look up topics like kangaroos and have them print out pictures from the internet.

Remember that ownership is personal but also a skill in lifelong learning.

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