Reading Intervention With the Hulk and Spiderman

This is a reflection on a three month long reading intervention with a 5th grade student from Guatemala. It summarizes my first hand experience and the lessons I learned about SIOP, accommodations and using comic books to teach literacy. For a more detailed analysis of the reading intervention and the growth I was able to affect, see the lecture notes from my presentation at Adams State College Student Scholar Days in the evidence of effectiveness section.

Holy Cow! What did I get myself into?
The more information I learned about my battle buddy, the more overwhelmed I became (“Case study” or “Intervention student” sounds like a lab rat so I call him my battle buddy).
I was thinking I could have picked a much easier student with whom to work. Then again, I could have chosen to be a factory worker instead of a teacher.
It wasn’t until I started asking for help that we started to make progress. I sought out information on my student’s first language from a number of people. Suddenly, many of my student’s reading problems were clear to me. Sounds he couldn’t seem to master didn’t even exist in his first language. Much of his native alphabet had different sounds from the English alphabet and vowels are used differently.

Success is contagious.
Once we experienced success, our motivation snowballed. I’m not sure who was happier the first time my battle buddy got a 100% on a spelling test. From that point on, he was more engaged and worked harder at everything we did. Everyone needs to feel success and that first little bit of it paid huge dividends.

Comic Books
They’re cheap, short, engaging, full of great illustrations and have good quality vocabulary. There is also plenty of research available to back their effectiveness as a tool for teaching literacy.
Cleaver, Samantha. “Mrs. Grundy’s right! You can teach reading with comics and graphic novels.” Instructor May/June 2008: 29-34.

http://www.comicbookproject.org/

Ranker, Jason. “Using comic books as read-alouds: Insights on reading instruction from an English as a second language classroom.” The Reading Teacher, 61(4), 296-305.

Kakalios, James. The Physics of Superheroes. New York: Penguin, 2005.

WARNING: Like most other entertainment, comic books have ratings. Familiarize yourself before using comics in your classroom.

Undercover Accommodation
My battle buddy wanted to do the same thing everyone else was doing. He didn’t want to take different tests or do different worksheets. It embarrassed him to be different. I learned to take what the class was working on and modify it to meet his needs. By taking timed multiplication tests and putting the questions in some sort of order, it allows my battle buddy to complete the problems easier without his test looking any different from everyone else’s.

Don’t be fooled by a 5th grader.
It took me a while to realize my student was fooling me. He could tell me the entire storyline of a given comic book from memory. The problem was he wasn’t actually reading the comic. He constructed the story strictly from the illustrations. When I asked him if he had any questions, he would flip the book open and ask me about the first big word he saw.
When people lose one of their senses, they naturally compensate by heightening their other senses. My student was no different. He struggled with reading, so he compensated by developing a keen ability to interpret context clues. He is also an expert at self correcting based on my facial expression. I’m still working on my spelling poker face.

What I learned:
You’re not alone unless you choose to be.
· Get help from other teachers and experts.
· Coordinate your effort with other teachers (ELL, Resource etc…).

Success equals motivation for everyone involved.

Use appropriate reading material.
· Interesting to your student.
· Good vocabulary-Lamborghini and Ferrari are not useful words.

Don’t be fooled by a 5th grader! They have well developed adaptation skills.

Learn their language and culture.
· Make connections.
· SIOP really works!

Practice undercover accommodation.
· Make your accommodations invisible to the rest of the class.
· Intervention students want to do the same thing everyone else is doing.