But I have been doing this now for almost three years. I have coached kindergarten, 2nd, 3rd. and 4th grade. I get it. It's not just what I am told anymore, instructing children has become much more intuitive to me and my confidence and "little voice in my head" is a lot more clear. I know how to sit down and get a kindergartner/1st grader to sound out words and make it fun. I know how to quiz a 3rd grader on math facts and get them in their head.
I am realizing more and more, as we watch our public schools kind of fall to pieces around us, we all need these skills. Let me give you two stories of what has happened to me in the last three days where I put those skills to work and got instant results.
First. Friday night I am at a candle party for a gal I have done several candle parties for over the last four or five years. We always connect because her son and my youngest son are within just a few weeks of each other in age and have the same name. After that, we don't have much in common. She is a single mom, living on section 8 housing, no car, food stamps, etc. I am amazed how her outlook is so positive and I wonder why she doesn't do anything with her outlook, but that is me.
Anyway, I walk into her itsy bitsy apartment Friday evening and she is talking to her sister about her son. They are pouring over sheets of paper and are perplexed at "what the teacher wants" and I hear that her son's teacher wants to hold him back a year. In my head I hear that voice say, "It's only February and the teacher is already looking to hold him back?" She asks me to look over the papers and see what they are for.
Well, what I can see, they are things to work on at home for her kindergartner, yet there is little instruction for the parents. A lot of pages with only graphics and nothing else. So is the kid supposed to color them, write letters, identify, circle certain ones.....have no idea. I find a calendar for February that shows some daily words that include "sight words". Sight words are those words like the, or, go, on, at, etc that we just look at and recognize. There are a ton of sight words.
I explain to my friend two things. First, she simply needs to go to the teacher and ask point blank, "What exactly do you want us to do with these pages that have graphics and nothing else?" My friend gets a little nervous and says, "Well, would she get mad at me for asking?" This is where my self sufficient hackles rear up. I ask her, "Who's kid is this? Yours or hers? You're not a parent of a kindergartner to make friends. You're a parent of a kindergartner to get your kid educated. If she is offended, then the teacher needs to grow some skin." I gave her a bit of a pep talk.
Second, I asked her little cute boy over to me and asked him, "What sound does 'g' make?" He didn't know, so I told him and made him copy the sound with me. Next I asked, "What sound does 'o' make?" He didn't know, so I told him and made him say it with me. Next I told him to run (officially, called "blending") the sounds together and we made the word "go". I ran my finger along the word so he would blend them as we came to the letter. Next I told him he needed to remember this word and showed him what it looked like written out. We also did the word "off". I told him I would ask him again in a few minutes. Over and over and over again that evening I asked showed him the words and asked him what they were. At first he didn't remember, I reminded him he needs to remember, and by the end of the evening he could look at both words and instantly say them. He thought it was pretty funny that I wrote them on the palm of my hand and would just open up my palm, show them, and ask. So I wrote them on his palm and told him he needed to remember them too. He got such a kick out of writing the words on his palm both his mom and I thought it could be a fun game to do that.
So I was able to show a kindergartner how to sound out a few words but more importantly, I showed his mom how simple it was to sound out and blend sounds for early reading. Just think, if we could all work with a young five year old at risk like this kid, we would change the course of education!
The next thing that happened this week was with a young sixth grader at our church. We'll call her J. She is a young girl at risk big time! She is in the custody of her mother, however, she has been in a foster home situation with a family in our church. It is has been a crazy and chaotic childhood this girl has had. She's been bounced around a lot and will quickly tell you "Oh, I missed fourth grade math." I scream in my head when I hear her say this, "Well, then why in the heck are you in the sixth??"
So things at her home get a little shaky and it's been awhile since we've seen J at church, and we wondered if we might never see her again. I have her cell number and have thought about calling her in recent weeks. Yet there she was at church today!
Today after church I always ask how school is going. She doesn't like it. She feels picked on by her teachers (what 12 year old girl doesn't feel picked on by teachers?) She feels like they make fun of her for her grades. I started asking questions. This is what I got. Her school is in a part of town where her rough childhood story just falls into a bucket of rough childhood stories. All the kids at her school are at risk, and the classroom sizes are huge. She turns in an assignment, gets it handed back to her with a bad grade on it and she doesn't know what to do after that. I also got out of her that she struggles the most with math and she doesn't know her math tables. Learning Coach Me jumped into action.
I gave J two assignments for this week, and I am going to ask her about it next Sunday. If she isn't in church I'll call her. First, the next time she gets a grade less than 70% on an assignment, I want her to respectfully go to her teacher and ask, "Can you help me to understand what I missed and didn't get on this so I can do better next time? Can I do anything to make this up?" I explained to her that by asking that, it will show her teacher she cares about her grades and teachers tend to gravitate toward those kinds of students.
Next, I asked her a couple of simple math fact questions. "J, what is 4 times 5?" "What is 3 times 6?" She couldnt' shoot the answer right back to me and she had to stop and do the successive adding to get it. I explained to her she needed to have those down pat in fourth grade. She immediately came by with her standard answer, "I missed fourth grade, remember?" J is great on putting that off as something done to her therefore she can't help herself. I then asked her, "Who can change that now?" Also I pointed out that no one is going to reteach it to her, ever. It is assumed by the end of fourth grade, a student knows their multiplication facts. I gave her another assignment. "J, I want you to go home and write out all of your multiplication six facts. Then I want you to memorize them. I am going to ask you what they are next week, and again I'll call you if I need to." I plan to have a little somethin' somethin' for her if she completes this task. Also, I will give her a bigger somethin' somethin' if she gets all of them memorized soon.
What is hilarious? She then said "Well maybe I'll screen your call" thinking she was so cute. I got serious and said, "That hurts no one but you. It's no skin off my nose, I know my math facts. I am doing this to help you." Interesting look on her face after that.
The better lesson learned here? My oldest son watching me engage with J. My oldest son who fights tooth and nail over doing math, yet does it well because I won't let him not do his work. I know he needs me to be on him like a bad rash and I know these are the consequences if he doesn't have these basic building blocks to his education.
Yet, am I a certified teacher? No. Am I a fabulous educator who knows everything about curriculum and learning tools? No. I hate to say it, and I had a skirmish with someone over this very issue a few weeks ago, no one needs to have a special certificate on their wall, have a certain certification, or a whole lot of student loan debt to be a "teacher" of basic skills. I am a mom who knows the consequences for these two kids if they don't have these simple skills in their school repetoire. Please take a moment and do it with these kinds of kids if you ever get to meet them like I did this week.
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