“The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge.”  ~ Thomas Berger

Although I don’t talk about my professional life in this space very often, I do want to share some of what I do outside the home for those of you looking for help with reading comprehension.

My official job title at the lovely Montessori school where I work is “Language Resource Specialist.” That is a fancy way of saying that I am fortunate to be getting paid, because my work is so much fun. Seriously. (Plus I only work a few hours a day so I get to spend the majority of my day with Snarfles and company at our little house in the woods).

I work with children on general language skills, Spanish, Latin, writers workshop, and one of my favorites, the Junior Great Books program.

Just so you know, I am not in any way being compensated for this post(JGB is a non-profit foundation). I simply want to share my experiences with it. I was introduced to it as a younger teacher and I confess that I didn’t fully embrace it. I went back to it a few years after completing my MA in reading and literacy and realized that it had almost every key element of comprehension.

I have come to appreciate this program so much because of all that it offers in terms of teaching students to question, have real and productive discussions about literature, and the inspiring writing component. Not to mention all of the built in lessons on critical parts of understanding text such as visualizing a story, learning to make inferences, and summarizing.

Last Thursday I was preparing to come home and realized with astonishment that in a little over three hours time, I had worked with one group on writing a Haiku, another on writing believable dialogue, and had an intriguing discussion with my oldest cohort on symbolism in dreams and Jungian interpretation theories. Not bad for one morning, huh?

Stories in the program cover many cultures and time periods, and are written by a variety of authors. They are stories rich with opportunities to model  open-ended questions and help children realize that there may be many interpretations to a query, depending on one’s perspective.

Another important skill covered in the curriculum is how to give evidence for an opinion from the story or discussion, providing wonderful experience in both citing sources and being able to debate an issue respectfully.

All technical reading teacher jargon aside, my students LOVE the stories and the dialogues that follow. They love coming up with alternate creative reading assignments. They love friendly debates. They love creating illustrations for each story. It has been a very positive experience all the way around.

So if you are a homeschooling parent or a teacher looking for an incredible reading program,you might like to investigate it further. To make a distinction, JGB is really geared for understanding text at a deeper level rather than learning the mechanics of reading. At each level, students are listening to the stories and following along rather than reading them on their own, although there are some fluency lessons in the stories for younger students.

If you do try it,  please send me an email or comment and tell me about your experience!

Peace,

Emmie