The first thing I noticed when I read this article by Barbara Moss is that we are losing our children. At grade four, there is a disconnect between reading through narrative and reading informational texts with the sole purpose to learn. It's no wonder some students hate to read. If I had to go from reading what I love to reading text dense with information vital to my education, I don't think I would like to read either. It would be a chore, as so many children view it to be. Moss makes an excellent point in saying that the informational text that children are exposed to is deficient in "quantity and quality". Her argument to introduce more quality informational texts is one that should be considered more closely.
The statistics that she presents concerning the amount of instructional time given to our students in the area of comprehension makes a powerful argument. It is shocking to think about all that we expect of our students without equipping them with the necessary tools to meet those expectations. We are leaving them with a major disadvantage and crippling their chance at success. One thing I know about students in the earlier grades is that they have a genuine love for learning that hasn't been extinguished by poor teaching or a lack of engagement in the classroom. There is an old saying in Neuroscience that goes, "Use it or lose it", which is speaking specifically about the firing of neurons. One of my psychology professors, Dr. Echevarria at USM explained to me that children are born with about a hundred billion neurons which decrease as some of them are not needed because the brain is not making connections. The first ten years of a child's life is critical in the area of language development and their neurons are constantly firing and making connections. I think informational text should be added as soon as possible in a student's life to take advantage of these neurons that are just waiting to make new connections.
I love the point that Moss makes concerning informational trade books in that they help children link what they are learning to the real world. I think there is a disconnect between the classroom and the real world. Every person who learns anything wants to know that there is a purpose for it, and children are just little people trying to figure out the world around them. Adding content area literacy into the early grade level classroom will also increase critical thinking skills at an earlier age which is vital to a child's development. It is imperative for them to know who they are as learners as early on as possible and the ability to read a text from a critical point of view will start them on the road to self-discovery and increase their metacognitive skills.
My only questions for Moss are these. First, I worry that by introducing informational text at such an early age, we will lose the genuine desire to read that we achieve with narrative. I do think that children will be interested in learning the information found in these texts, but I am concerned that a struggling reader might not do as well in this area. How can I prevent this portion of my students from falling behind due to a lack of desire to read? Second, I think Moss is right when she says that teachers feel the need to "teach to state standards", or teach to the test as I have so often heard. Students are feeling more and more pressure to conform their learning around what they think is going to be asked of them. They have lost the joy of learning or perhaps never achieved it in the first place because learning is work. It is work because they feel the pressure to perform and regurgitate information. How can we use the ideas that Moss presents to prevent this from happening to our students? How can we use informational texts to give our students the gift of a genuine learning experience?
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