You're Our Heroes

A first grade teacher reported that her students declared all the struggling readers in the class as heroes during a time when the class was earning the privilege of having lunch with a children’s author. They had all being trying to read at home a predetermined amount of pages each night in order to be able to attend the special event. As the amount of pages read got reported each day, children could see on a large classroom graph how well they were doing towards their reading goal. As the big event got closer, the more earnest the children’s efforts became. Just as the students thought they would never meet their classroom reading goal, the struggling readers stepped up and saved the day! The lower leveled first grade books had less words on a page, allowing the lower performing students to read more pages. Every time a struggling reader reported their pages to the teacher a classroom cheer would go up. Students would say to them, “You must be reading all the time.” And, they would respond proudly, “Yeah, I am!”