Making Mental Movies

I hate to be making the same excuse over and over again, but we continue to have to network connections at much of Third Street, particularly in room 19. It's been a week now. I'm sorry again for a late post, but when I come home in the afternoon Miss Edie just demands a walk, and then there's dinner to make, and before I know it, it's 9:00 pm.

Other than the computer problems, a splendid, if fairly routine, day. I'd like to just focus on one key thing we worked on today. And that is the skill of making mental movies. Now, this is something that kids are do pretty well. In fact, we adults complain all the time that they are "daydreaming" when they should be doing something we deem more productive. Yet somehow they have trouble taking this natural aptitude and applying it to reading. I suppose that our obsession with making sure that they read correctly and quickly has a lot to do with it. But the results of not "daydreaming" while you read are quite bad, almost tragic.

Reading really isn't about how correctly or rapidly you recognize the words. Instead, it's about getting meaning from print. And to do that, readers need to become absorb the ideas, not the words. For fiction, and for a lot of nonfiction too, this means that they need to be able to "see" the setting, the characters, and the events in the story. They need to combine the description that the author provides with stuff from their own life and turn it into a mental movie. Good readers don't read books, the "watch" them. That's why a good reader almost always finds the Hollywood version of a favorite book so disappointing: our brains are capable of the most fabulous special effects, far better than anything Industrial Light and Magic can do, and the actors we cast in out heads are so much more talented than the ones who hold SAG cards.

All of this takes a little willingness to pause from reading and to let the pictures form in our heads. It's a skill everybody can learn, though it may seem awkward at first. It's particularly hard to practice this at school where you are sure that everybody else is looking at you, and where the teacher always seems to be perpetually in a "hurry up" mood. We are working on this skill however in our busy classroom. Today as we read the wonderful "Toto" story in the Open Court text -- I think it's the best selection in the book -- the students looked for descriptive words and put them on post-it notes. Tomorrow they will look for some more, and after we share these we will work on creating first a mental picture and then making an actual color picture just from the words. It should be interesting. Keep tuned to see some of the results!

Home Studies: (1) Independent Reading: Students should be reading about 30 minutes each evening and writing a short -- roughly half page -- entry in their reading journals. I will start collecting these Friday. (2) Finish the chapter in the math book, if not already done, by Wednesday at the latest. (3) Finish the History packet. We started this one in class. (4) Do the two fairly short Open Court pages.