Why The Joyful Reading Approach is Needed Now More Than Ever

Now more than ever, we must fill our virtual and in-person classrooms with joyful reading experiences.  Because of the profound challenges of the pandemic and social distance learning, we need this now more than ever.  With the added pressure of ‘catching kids up'  - academically-  a rapid loss of joy in the classroom surrounds us . However, we have the power to make big changes - joy can be experienced day after day - year after year - and right now it is SO important.  Learn more about The Joyful Reading Approach and how you can create joyful shared reading experiences for you and your students. 

Check out more at www.ginapepin.com

Transcript

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Welcome to the Let's Talk Teacher to Teacher podcast. My name is Dr. Gina Pepin, and I am so happy to meet you. I'm a Midwestern mom of three, reading professor, and a busy reading specialist at a wonderful elementary school. I was the 2018-19 Upper Michigan Teacher of the Year, and I enjoy mentoring teachers of all levels. I have a great passion for early literacy, and I'm a co-author, along with the extremely talented children's author, Eric Litwin, of a newly released text from Scholastic entitled The power of joyful reading help your young reader soar to success. Each week I will offer you practical make and takes, easy tips along with real life shared stories so that you can easily create joyful shared reading experiences in your classroom, daycare centers and homes right away. I am here to help you make powerful changes. Let's do this together. This podcast focuses on why the joyful reading approach is needed now more than ever. We know that now more than ever, we must fill our virtual and in-person classrooms with joyful reading experiences. Because of the profound challenges of that pandemic and social distance learning, we need this more now than ever. There's also added pressure of catching kids up academically, and then it's leading to a rapid loss of joy in our classrooms. But joy can be experienced day after day, year after year, and right now it is so important. It's urgent. It is critical for both students and teachers. Let me tell you a little bit more about it. The joyful reading approach begins with a simple premise that all children need and deserve a strong reading foundation. It is essential because everything else in school will be built upon this foundation. Research shows that the roots of learning to read begin with shared and engaging oral language experiences that are connected to print. This is where our children first hear the sounds in words. They connect them to letters. This is how they will learn and experience new words as they extend and refine each of their vocabularies. This is where they happily practice and strengthen expressive speech which conveys meaning. We know the benefits are so extraordinary that the American Academy of Pediatrics has come out with a policy statement based on extensive research reviews saying shared reading is necessary for full language, cognitive, and social-emotional development. We can put these joyful reading experiences to work in our pre-kindergarten, kindergarten, and early elementary and help all our students develop their reading foundation. This includes developing the basic reading skills and knowledge they need for successful reading instruction. Guiding them to love books, enjoy reading, and really see themselves as readers is really, really at the forefront. There's nothing standing in our way, and it doesn't cost any extra money. The joyful reading approach supports all curriculum and all reading instruction. It can be done by all teachers in any kind of learning environment. It will also make the school day more joyful for students and teachers. This is the joyful reading approach. Here's how it works. We help students build their reading foundation by intervening joyful and engaging shared reading experiences into our daily routines, our activities, our lessons, and our early childhood classrooms throughout the day, day after day, all year long. It is super simple to do. We create these joyful and engaging shared reading experiences anytime we happily connect oral language, to print and we read it together. And this leads to so many additional opportunities. For example, throughout the day, we often remind our students and our children of classroom expectations. So why not put this in a catchy song or a fun poem and share the words on the whiteboard or a poster? Now you have a delightful recurring shared reading experience. Let me share an example with you. Here is one if you can repeat after me. Sit in your chair, hands in your lap, smile crocodile then clap clap clap so now you can add motions to this it's a simple four lines with a little bit of rhyming a little bit of fun and a little bit of over exaggeration you can turn that simple classroom expectation into something that is so much more and your students are going to even be better at learning and being able to comprehend and actually going to be more engaged will students receive and learn the classroom expectations better when presented this way in an interactive style Absolutely, of course they will. And in the meantime, don't forget they're learning words, sounds, a little bit of expressive fluency, and so much more. Your daily routines just go better when they include a joyful shared reading experience. Instructional activities and lessons will also benefit when they include some of these shared reading experiences. So for example, when engaging students in a math lesson on subtraction, the chorus of Eric's subtraction book, Beat the Cat, and his four groovy buttons can easily be adapted to support these primary math objectives. Think of how much fun that could actually be. This would provide context and even multi-sensory engagement and it makes the entire math lesson much more effective. So immersing early childhood students in these powerful reading experiences throughout the day, day after day, all year long, helps them to develop key reading skills and knowledge that they will need for successful reading instruction. And it leads them to love books, enjoy reading, and really try But even more important, the joyful reading approach has other important benefits. It infuses intentional and focused joy into our school day, something all our students and our teachers truly need in these challenging times. It also helps bring our schools together, even when we have to keep physically apart in areas that this is still applicable. So what unites a school more than working together around an essential, joyful goal? Together you become a big, school-wide loving group. reading family. Judy Willis, who is a neurologist and classroom teacher, shares in the Neuroscience of Joyful Education that brain research tells us that when the fun stops, learning often stops too. We know that our students need an abundance of ongoing activities where they are highly engaged and they take great pleasure in learning. She quotes that when students are engaged and motivated and feel minimal stress, information flows freely through the affective filter and they achieve higher levels of cognition. They make a and experience those aha moments. Such learning comes not from quiet classrooms and direct lectures, but from classrooms with an atmosphere of exuberant discovery. Research in brain-based learning suggests that superior learning takes place when classroom experiences are enjoyable and when they're relevant to students' lives, their interests, and their experiences. We know that because of this pandemic. Today, students are coming into our classrooms with different levels of stress, low motivation, lack of stamina and endurance, and seemingly little interest in their learning. So as we learn more about the brain and learning, implementing the joyful reading approach can create ideal social-emotional support and academically motivating learning environments. In The Power of Joyful Reading, we discuss how to turn classrooms into reading playgrounds and how to teach like true reading superheroes. We truly need those reading superheroes now more than ever. So there are There are four essential elements to creating joyful, engaging reading experiences for young children. And Eric and I have outlined these in the acronym HERO. It begins with H. And H is for human. We know that human beings are unique and social. And we know even more so that reading is a deeply human experience. So our reading instruction must be this as well. Children are learned through these meaningful interactions. And reading and writing experiences need to include a cherished teacher or caregiver one that's interacting with children in authentic ways. So immersing our students in print while simultaneously celebrating each learner's uniqueness is truly critical and it's an important element. Giving students agency and choice is also powerful. It's that true motivation to read versus a skill of reading. Students will engage with increasingly challenged texts if they are highly interested and motivated. They will attempt to read because they want to know more about a particular topic They will even use those strategies that they have learned in class or ask a friend or an adult and they will figure out a way to get that information. This is the true example of reading with a purpose. Our students need opportunities to see and hear what good reading should look and what does it feel like. They need to be able to view proficient reading behaviors. Best way to do this is through shared reading experiences and read-alouds. This is where teachers read aloud to students. They're able to share with the class what goes through their mind as a proficient reader. True metacognition. What reading strategies that they need to use. What the reader is experiencing. How to use fix-up strategies and really how to comprehend the text. These are all important elements of H is for human. The second part is E. E is for experiential. We know that learning happens best when students are immersed in the entire process. Utilizing multi-sensory participation techniques equals highly experiential learning opportunities. I think that Debra Crouch and Brian Camburn also share it best in Made for Learning, How the Conditions of Learning Guide Teaching Decisions, because they identify immersion as a crucial condition for learning. They say that students hear and attempt not only words, but also the sounds, the rhythms, and cadences of language that they are learning. Even more so, Purnell Ripp has a new book, is on passionate readers and the art of reaching and engaging every child, notes that teachers of reading seem to work miracles. There's truly magic of school and teaching a child to read is one of the biggest real-life magic tricks of all time. But one of the things that's happening is we're leaving out hope. The biggest mistake we make as reading teachers is that for some of our kids we do not protect that hope that they have for becoming or even remaining a reader. We get so caught up in the skills of reading and teaching those and meeting all of those requirements that we leave no time to truly talk and discuss or to nourish what it means to be a reader and why we should be lifelong readers beyond that version of our curriculum. We need to take the time. We need to ask our kids to be readers and we need to see their perceptions and really find out why they view themselves as not. And this is when reading lost its magic. This is when we had to read to discover things such as producing writing and to discuss a text or to read about something that we had to do for part of the curriculum. And that's where reading gets lost. It loses is its magic because we aren't doing it to fall in love with the words or dive deeply into the pages. And we really need to create those occurrences and those opportunities for our students again. We need to have our students experience activities and opportunities where we can help them to keep the hope alive and protect that love of reading. We need to plan for time to read, not just to read, but again, to fall in love with the act of reading. So as we plan our reading lessons, plan to make them experience Truly joyful experiences. Incorporate as much joy as possible. Utilize the components of the joyful reading approach. We need to let our students have daily experiences also with exploring texts. This was one of my favorite things that my third graders did several years ago. It was truly called book exploration time. And at that time, we even could label it as text exploration. Give them time to look through recipe books. Put all kinds of different forms of texts in baskets and buckets and books, recipes, sports trading cards, Ripley's Believe It or Not, graphic novels, newspapers, magazines, anything that they can get to know better that they may not have had access to in their own homes. Provide time for them to just explore and then also provide time for independent reading. What we look for in independent reading is that time when students can actually apply the strategies that they've learned to their own personal reading. They self-select texts that fit their reading level and their interest level. And teachers provide opportunities for them to practice this. We need to provide more opportunities for them to practice. We do a lot of teaching of strategies with limits on actual practice application. So in order for our students to learn how to read and to use reading to learn, they must have plenty of opportunities to practice reading from a variety of different types of texts. The third component is R, and R is for recurring Learning is more likely to happen and be remembered when the same or similar experience happens many times a day, day after day, all year long, especially when it comes to young children. You can make joyful reading experience happen anytime, anywhere in your day simply by putting text and rhythm to everyday tasks such as reviewing classroom expectations, making lunch choices, or getting ready to go home. When joyful experiences recur, it's fun and it leads to engagement and it leads to learning. Learning to read is all about providing opportunities for our students to grow as readers, to allow them to comprehend, question, to think aloud, to share, make connections, make inferences, and even predictions all around authentic texts and recurring practices. We are always learning how to become better readers. The fourth part of hero is O. O is for optimal. Designing reading experiences that are optimal for literacy development is essential so that every moment is full of of learning potential. This will require that experiences we create must be guided by a teacher's firm knowledge of how children actually learn to read, which enables them and everyone involved to focus and adapt to meet the needs of all of your students, all of their diverse needs. Teacher expertise is not only warranted, but it's necessary because building your own knowledge of reading development is really crucial. And being able to optimize every single moment of opportunity that you have with your students is one of the most powerful superhero components that we can outline. Just remember again that the joyful reading approach can work harmoniously with purposeful reading and writing activities and research informed direct instruction. This is the perfect example of an optimal opportunity. It is in that power then that joy can happen. So students are vested in their own learning and teachers are strategically connecting every single learning moment with the next. So just a reminder, write I just really want to stress the importance of now more than ever it is essential to help all our students build a joyful foundation in reading. We really need to facilitate and optimize the development of those basic reading skills and knowledge to prepare our students for reading instruction. We want to guide our students to love books, truly enjoy reading, and most importantly to see themselves as a reader. We need to fill our in-person and virtual classrooms with as many joyful reading experiences as we can. I challenge you now to to create better reading experiences for your students, create joyful, shared experiences throughout your entire day. Bring back that magic and the joy of learning to read. And most importantly, ignite hope that everyone can become a reader. And don't forget to celebrate that process along the way. Eric and I hope you will put the power of joyful reading to work in your schools and your classrooms today because if you've learned anything from today's podcast, It's needed now more than ever. Thank you for joining me today, and I look forward to sharing more tips and practical applications with you soon.