Hello everyone! I couldn’t have access to the blog until this week so this is my first post related with the first week of class.
My first post it is about reading when we were kids. May be, nowadays most of you don’t remember or don’t have lot of memories related with reading when you were little, but I am sure that if you start thinking about it at list you will have one memory.
For some of you, reading would be one of the funniest or more interesting things in your lives just because you had the opportunity to read good books or may be because someone made it amusing for you. But I am sure that for others reading was not such an entertaining thing…
During my live I had the opportunity to see different cases of children that really hate reading; the first one was my own case. When I started to read it was funny for me, but little by little I saw that everyone improved their reading skills and I still had problems with the comprehension or with the fluency. My teachers were always telling me that I didn’t know how to read and that I had never pay attention so that’s why I started to feel frustrated and there were a couple of years that for me, reading was like a nightmare until my aunt bought me the book of “The little prince” and she started to read with me.
Now, in the university when I was doing my practicum in the schools I also have seen children with reading problems but the difference it is that nowadays teachers are aware of that kind of problems and they pay more attention to them trying to avoid that feeling of inferiority.
I decided to write about it because the other day we were thinking about our reading memories and I could feel again that even now, I sometimes think that I hate reading because I don’t do it well, but after the class I thought about so many questions like: What would happen if someone helped me before? What would happen if I didn’t have that teacher? If my aunt didn’t help me, I still have reading problems?
Anyway as future teacher we should pay attention to the reading process of our future pupils and of course their difficulties and problems because not all of them are going to learn as fast as we want.
Try to make them feel like an important part of the book!
Hi Nerea!
Don’t misunderstand me but I am very glad for reading your frustration about reading. That’s why, as you were, I also belonged to the thousand of cases that hated reading.
Firstly, I’ve grown up in a family in which it didn’t know how to teach my sister and me the different pleasures of reading. The one that reads novels a lot is my mother. My father reads also a lot but he uses to read magazines and newspapers.
When I was a child I began reading books because of the amount of beautiful images. I liked reading the text first, seeing the images then and imagining myself inside the story as if I was the main character. In that time, I remember my father reading with me at bedtime. For me it was very great.
Nevertheless, as time passed, I didn’t know if my parents considered us very old to still reading to us or whatever but they left reading to us and didn’t participate on any kind of reading activity with us neither. I suppose that they didn’t know how to encourage us to still reading, so It was very normal for my sister and me to see our parents reading but on their own.
Besides, It was not only my parents fault. At school teachers only ordered us to read a few books per year. They neither didn’t encourage us to read by reading us stories or introducing us the mystery of some books… We just read because it was compulsory. There was not any passion in there.
These reasons, in time, carried me to read less and less books because there was not an “ideal book” for me. The truth is that it made me feel a bit of embarrassment at the moment in which my classmates compared their literature experiences with the rest. But I’ve not stopped reading my friend. As you, I suppose, I had a bad conception of reading because I imagined reading as reading only novels, poetry and all those heavy books. I didn’t realize until a few time ago that reading also involves different kinds of magazines, newspapers, interesting articles, history… So It could be a happy ending for those cases that, as ours, didn’t like reading in their childhood, and I think it must be carried into class as well.
Hi Nerea!!
First of all, welcome to the blog. I have read your post and I have to say you that in some cases I have felt very close to you, When Raquel said us to do the Reading map, my first thing that appeared in my head was “I don’t remember the books that I have read when I was I child and I thought if this was because I didn’t read a lot because I didn’t like it or maybe was something related with my memory”
I was talking with my mother about my reading experiences, and at the begining as you, I really like to read and for me was really funny. But when I started the school and some books were compulsory for me, it caused me sometimes the feeling that you say in your post. I didn’ like to read, because the type of books were not catchy for me and it caused me to read not as well as I knew.
Related with your comment that you think that nowadays teachers are more involve than years ago, I have to say yo that I more or less agree for some reasons. One of them is that nowadays I think that many teachers are very involved in the reading process but others not. Another reason is years ago teachers had not so many resources to improve or motivate the reading process.
For all of this, I consider our aim has to be make books catchier for our students to avoid this kind of frustrations or problems, because we have a lot of RESOURCES. Let’s motivate them!