The Adventure Led Me Here

When I was in high school and had plans to become a high school English teacher (if you know me personally, you’ll realize how laughable the idea of me teaching high school is), I used to lay awake at night and lesson plan, like most eighteen-year-old do. I didn’t know much about education or teaching, but I was convinced that I would make my classes read Jane Austen novels and have them all dress up in period garb and hold a tea. My plans weren’t expanded much further than that, but I was convinced that would material enough to carry us through several months of the school year. Fast forward a few years when, during senior year of my undergrad, I had the opportunity to intern in a kindergarten classroom (I’d since given up my dreams of high school teaching and decided to go get my master’s in elementary education instead) and teach a lesson. I wouldn’t say my lesson was a failure of epic proportions, but I will note that it included having kindergartners sit on the carpet ...

At the beginning of the school year, I try to set a few areas that I want to focus on throughout the year. Some of the goals never quite come to fruition (let’s be honest, my desk is still a hot mess, despite my lofty ambition to organize it weekly) while others are slightly more successful. One of my goals was to create a culture and love of reading in my classroom. I had the opportunity to attend the Reading Summit hosted by Scholastic last summer and hear Donalyn Miller speak (she’s the QUEEN of the reading world), and I was left to reflect on my own practice. If I teach phonics and the elements of a story but the kids despise reading, what have I really taught? Reading should be transformative. Empathy, perspective, compassion, imagination, and creativity are all nestled between the pages of a book. If we never allow kids to experience this, then we’re truly doing them a dangerous disservice. This is not to diminish or ignore the critical role of phonics, phonemic awareness, st...