Revive the Lost Art of the Nursery Rhyme

Shortly before Tata’s (my great aunt’s) passing, I took my daughters to visit her in the hospital. She told me she had a dream that my girls knew all of their nursery rhymes. Shamefully, I thought, "They don’t."  It is in her loving memory, I am proud to say my children now know their nursery rhymes and I hope many other children will too!

The brain is a powerful pattern decoder.  It is how the brain learns.  It absorbs the world around it and makes sense of things through patterns and connections uncovered through the senses.  Our language is full of patterns. This language-pattern awareness is needed for literacy.  When a child has a grasp of sound patterns in the language, educators call it phonological awareness. 

“…Wise Mother Goose… “Tucked inside “Hickory, dickory dock, a mouse ran up the clock” and other rhymes can be found a host of potential aids to sound awareness- alliteration, assonance, rhyme, repetition. Alliterative and rhyming sounds teach the young ear that words can sound similar because they share a first or last sound”  (Wolf, p. 98-99).  

Parents and grandparents, practice nursery rhymes with your babes.  You efforts are building future readers. 

Wolf, M. (2007). Proust and the squid: The story and science of the reading brain. New York, NY. Harper Perennial.

The Eternal Essence of a Growth Mindset

I am a bit of a regular in the TED-Ed Community and have met a number of exceptionally brilliant people through that space.  One of these people is Steven Sutantro.  He wrote a post called The Key of Growth Mindset: Learn, Unlearn, Relearn that made an impact because I keep thinking about it in application to my professional growth.

Until recently, my guiding idea in professional practice was the Teaching and Learning Cycle.  Now, I have replaced that cycle in my mind with one more reflective of a growth mindset.  I envision taking the cycle and bending it over into the infinity symbol.  The unlearning is the bridge between learning and relearning.  

The teaching profession is infamous in saying,  "This <fill in the blank>  is just like <fill in the blank> that we used to do.'  However, there is great value in the subtle twist of a nuance. Sometimes, the subtle twist moves one from encountering an idea to understanding that idea.  And sometimes, it is not a twist  Sometimes, it is a complete transformation away from an original guiding idea or practice.

I've crossed the unlearning bridge a number of times lately.  Here is one example.

Learn

When I began teaching, all obvious signs of reading trouble in the intermediate grades was comprehension.  The programs I had to work with zeroed in on comprehension strategies. The assessments I gave in the intermediate grades focused on comprehension. The curriculum (pre NCLB), and then the standards (post NCLB), pointed to comprehension.  The data gathered from the assessments pointed to issues of comprehension.  With all of the evidence pointing me to comprehension, I focused on comprehension in the classroom.

Unlearn

After meeting Brenda Erickson, a Montessori veteran, I began to focus on foundational reading skills.   I unlearned my assumption that students needed the name of a letter first when beginning literacy (through the Souns program) and this unlearning led to unlearning comprehension was the only culprit for reading troubles in the intermediate grades. 

If I could only go back in time...  

Relearn

I cannot go back but I can go forward. I relearned the intricate connections of reading, writing, listening and speaking bound together by sounds. After teaching my children in a Montessori-minded way, I realized how my children demonstrated stronger phonemic awareness than many of the 3rd, 4th and 5th students I taught. While I cannot return to students of the past, I can do something for students today.  I check letter sound knowledge of older children and then I listen to them read and notate my observations on a running record.  I relearned a focus for reading instruction for students who were struggling simply by looking for missing pieces in the foundation, the alphabetic principle, and it has made a difference for many struggling readers I have encountered.

Unlearning requires pride swallowing but it is the pathway to professional growth.  It challenges the ego who realizes that a past practice (or even a publication) may be flawed or incorrect.  Once one accepts past mistakes, or misguided practices, as necessary for growth and overcomes the stubborn ego, a significant new level of learning can begin.

Have you crossed the unlearning bridge in your professional practice? 

How can we transition a system through the unlearning bridge?

Share your ideas with the TED-Ed Community! 

Sutantro, S. (2014). The key of growth mindset: learn, unlearn, relearn. Eductechpost Retrieved from http://edutechpost.wordpress.com/2014/03/31/the-key-of-growth-mindset-learnunlearn-relearn/