Keeping it Real!

Working out is important
-- but it isn't the end goal!

Children do a lot of writing in school -- they fill out worksheets, answer reading comprehension questions, practice their spelling words.  Writing like this is similar to working out in a gym -- running in place on a treadmill, lifting heavy objects just to put them down again, etc.  These are not activities you would do in real life -- but they prepare you for the real activities.  When I go to the gym, my real goal is not to be able to walk on the treadmill for 30 minutes.  My goal is to be able to walk the four flights of stairs to my office without huffing and puffing.  In the same way, when children write out their spelling words, the real goal isn't to learn to spell hundreds and hundreds of words on a list.  The goal is to be able to write letters to friends or to write out plans for a new business or to express feelings in a poem.  Reading and writing are ultimately about communication -- I am talking to you, now, with words I wrote yesterday or the day before.  I can reach out across time and space and connect with you because we both know how to read and write.


Just like the athlete who works out in the gym, however, we do need to practice.  Children need to learn grammar and spelling.  These are important tools that they work on throughout the school year. The trick is to not lose sight of the real goal while you're practicing.  When Literacy Empowers All People works with children over the summer, that is what we do.  With the freedom that summer provides us (no testing! no homework!), we are able to focus on writing for real.  We avoid having children write something that is not part of communication between one person and another.  When they work on reading comprehension, their goal is to explain what they read to other children in the class who read a different book.  When they write essays, it is to share with us the problems they would like to solve in their communities.  And, at the end of the program, they present, in writing, carefully researched solutions to those problems to people who can implement them.  Our students have written to mayors and state legislators -- even to the President of the United States.  They have presented their ideas to their principal -- and have seen them enacted. 

Here at LEAP we believe that focusing on the real purposes of reading and writing will help out students improve much faster than drilling them on spelling or grammar would.  This summer, we will be measuring how much the children improve as well as taking the authenticity (or "realness") of the reading and writing they do each day.  Our expectation is that children who participate in more authentic literacy tasks will improve even more than those who have less authentic literacy instruction.  This is exciting research that will guide how we work with our amazing kids in the future.  Doing this research, however, costs money -- we have a lot of books and pens and pencils to buy.  We need to have teachers who have time to work closely with each student (we have a 1:5 student/teacher ratio).  I hope you'll help us reach our goals by supporting LEAP.  You can make your tax deductible contribution here.