The Inspiration for Rudy and the Owl
In 2015, I retired from teaching at a middle school in the suburbs of Boston and moved out to Arizona with my husband. It was a great career move for him, and a golden opportunity for me to begin chapter two as a writer. I was ready for the change, but adjusting to life in the desert proved more challenging than I anticipated. It took two years to get settled into a home and, once I did, I discovered that I craved community connection more than the solitary life of a writer.
An opportunity presented itself fairly quickly. A small charter school located just around the corner from my new home put out an advertisement for a part time instructional assistant. I applied for and accepted the position. My job was to work in small groups with struggling middle school students on reading and writing in order to prepare them for the statewide AZ Merit exams that occurred every spring. The hours were perfect, the staff welcoming, and the students a pleasure to work with. It was a perfect solution for my situation.
As the year wound down, I was looking forward to working with this group on a creative writing project that eighth grade teachers were planning to launch once the high stakes tests were out of the way. Narrative writing was my speciality, and I had developed some fun and effective lessons to help middle schoolers develop their craft. But I was in for a surprise. When the state tests were over, the superintendent reassigned me to the kindergarten. She wanted me to work with struggling emerging readers.
“I don’t have any experience with this age group,” I admitted.
“Your license says you are qualified as a Reading Specialist, grades K-12,” the perceptive leader noted. Indeed, that was true. “I want you to pull small groups and work with them until they can read the last story in the primer series.” She handed me a stack of anthologies, a pack of flashcards, and a schedule to follow which included two days of observation in both classes I would be supporting.
The last story in the primer was “Owl and the Moon,” by Arnold Lobel. I remembered the Owl at Home series from when my own children were young. The stories were classics in our home. I started my sessions with a story in the middle of the anthology to get a feel for how well the students read, and followed the choral reading strategy favored by my colleagues, followed by flash card drills.
It did not go well. At first, my adorable group was cooperative, but they quickly became fidgety when others read. Engaging the whole group to read as one did not work either. I noticed that many had memorized the stories because they were not even looking at the text, so the exercise was more performative than skill based. I had to do something.
As always, I turned to the reading-writing connection for literacy instruction. I decided to have students create a story using the vocabulary from “Owl and the Moon” and have every child create his own children’s book. I made a list of vocabulary words and a created a story map staring a red cardinal–a nod to Arizona’s football team– who is looking for an owl. I called my protagonist Ruby in honor of the bird’s brilliant color. The kids loved this fact. I selected easily recognizable birds to interact with the cardinal: a bat, turkey, and crow, and added the moon as a character. I even found a way to incorporate some science into the story by highlighting the phases of the moon. I printed pictures of these birds and adhered them to ice cream sticks to make a makeshift puppet, and splurged on classroom supplies of writing paper, black markers, index cards, and colored pencils.
The first task was to narrate the story of Ruby’s adventures as she looks for the owl. During this phase, I encouraged students to imagine how each of these animals would act if confronted by a little red bird. Next, we transcribed the vocabulary words. If a student could not write out any particular word from listening, that became a flashcard for that child.
On the first page when Ruby is introduced, the text reads, “Ruby was a small red bird who wanted to know one thing. Who did he hear hoo-hoo-hooing?” The bolded words are the sight words we practiced, and we talked about the difference between the who/hoo and know/no. Once we read the content of the whole story, students prepared their own books in a process that looked like this:
- Read the text to me.
- Write the text out in his or her own book.
- Read the text back to me.
- Begin process again for the next page.
While waiting for the reading checks, students were free to illustrate, but illustrating was really a job for after the text was completed.
What a change! Students showed enthusiasm when I showed up to pull them out of class to come to writer’s workshop. They no longer goofed around, but worked productively throughout the session. Most were proud of the product they created. Some even took creative license with the text. If the page was too long, I would ask which part is most important and that is what the student would use in his or her story.
My little kindergarteners took their finished books home for Mother’s Day, and many reported that their parents were thrilled with their child’s accomplishments and the hand made gift to keep for the ages. Almost all of my students were able to read “Owl and the Moon” after our project with little difficulty.
Hopefully, by turning skill and drill lessons into a writer’s workshop, I might also have inspired a love of literacy in these emerging readers. By tapping their imagination and giving them ownership of a story, they learned more than how to sound out words. They had to have command of story structure, they practiced visualizing the meaning of text, and they had a fun experience with literature.