Robins and Blue Jays

A friend of mine from high school recently "pinned" this picture on her Pinterest:

I found it interesting, because as a special education teacher, my reaction to a "slow" reader asking to read is a little more like this:



I've been giving the Borat thumbs-up quite a bit in the past couple of weeks. I'm a co-teacher, which means I "push-in" (in my case, all day) to a regular education class to serve my special education students. Recently, I started pulling out a small group of kids for about 40 minutes a day to give them some more direct instruction in reading strategies and read a novel together. I thought they might resist a little since it makes them look different from the rest of the class, but I was totally wrong. They ask me allllll morning long when we're going to "that reading thing." They listen while we read, (thank you, Class Dojo) answer comprehension questions, and remember the strategies we talk about. It's a miracle.

Here's the best part, and the part that ties into the memes I opened with. These little darlings actually FIGHT over who gets to read aloud when we work on our novel. Sentences truly overheard in our classroom this week:

"But she got to read TWO pages already! That's so unfair!"

"I didn't get to read yet! I raised my hand quietly!"

"I don't want that page! It's too short!"

And why does whining about wanting to read warm my heart so much? I have the 7 lowest performing readers in the class in this small group. I have a little boy who, at the beginning of the year, told me he hated reading aloud because he sounded like a kindergartener. I have two girls for whom English is a second language. I have 3 boys with learning disabilities and one who won't read in the regular classroom without trying to use a funny accent. They skip lines, they leave out words, they mispronounce words. And then- they correct each other. They show each other the right line. They explain the things their friends don't understand.

Truly, those are the best 40 minutes of my day, and I don't care if they read 5 words a minute. I couldn't be prouder.