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By LEE SHERMAN P ORTLAND, Oregon—"One of our tadpoles got his front legs!" Nicholas tells a visitor, pointing to a big glass jar alive with squiggling baby frogs. The first-grader’s eyes, wide with wonder, betray the pride and excitement he feels as he shares his news. For several months, Nicholas and his classmates at Applegate Elementary School have witnessed the drama of emerging life. They’ve seen clusters of slimy eggs yield big-eyed amphibians, and cottony cocoons produce orange-and-black-winged butterflies. But far from being confined to glass jars, these real-life science lessons have spilled out and spread to every corner of Room 7. Veteran teacher Molly Chun has blended frogs and bugs, snakes and turtles, spiders and crabs into the students’ reading and writing activities. Drawing on a rich collection of children’s literature and a mixed bag of creative teaching strategies, she weaves discrete bits and pieces of learning into a coherent web of meaning for her 20 students. Using the big book Tadpole Diary by David Drew as a model, the students individually record their week-by-week observations of their classroom frogs’ development. (Another big book, Caterpillar Diary by the same author, provides a model for recording butterfly observations.) The students then pool their knowledge and identify the gaps in their understanding. As the kids call out bits of information, Chun records them boldly with a black marker on white chart paper for all to see. "What do you know about tadpoles?" Chun asks the children, who sit cross-legged on a frayed square of carpet in one corner of the room. "They’re tiny!" one child volunteers. "They’re slippery," offers another. "They swim with their tails," a third calls out. Chun lists the children’s statements, one after the other. Then she creates a second column on the chart paper, labeled, "What do you want to know about tadpoles?" Again, she writes down the children’s words. "When do they learn to hop?" a student wonders. "When do they eat flies and bugs? "Do they have nests?" In another seamless blending of science and literacy, where life and print merge, the students create a collaborative poem based on their scientific observations. "Caterpillars" by Room 7 goes like this:
Embodying children’s speech in print—showing them that the words they speak have written equivalents—can help young children make the critical link between sounds and letters necessary for reading, research has found. The small scientists, peering through jeweler’s lenses to enlarge their vision, examine not only the classroom frogs, but also the flora and fauna of the city park that adjoins their urban campus. After an hour of outdoor exploration one warm April afternoon, Chun’s students share their observations, likening each seen object to something else they’ve encountered in their six or seven years on earth. Their analogies—where they verbally connect new information with old—paint vivid pictures of the transforming power of the magnifying lenses on their world. But even more importantly, they show the power of words to communicate and illuminate experience. To the question, "What did you see, and what else did it remind you of?" came responses like these: "I saw a little gray spider that looked like a monster." "I saw tiny yellow spiders that looked like Charlotte’s spiders." "I saw pitch that looked like gold." "I saw a hole in a tree that looked like a cave." "I saw the seed of a wishing flower that looked like a nut." Says Chun: "I really believe in the constructivist theory—that children learn by making meaning out of their world." She characterizes her approach to literacy instruction as whole language. But in her two decades of classroom experience, Chun has found that explicit phonics is a necessary component of early-literacy instruction. "Children have to have direct instruction in phonics," says Chun. "But I try to embed that in a meaningful context. If I give the kids a worksheet, which they get every once in a while, they’ll do it, but they don’t latch onto it. It’s not meaningful. It’s very frustrating for them a lot of the time." Direct instruction in phonics is particularly critical in inner-city schools such as Applegate, Chun notes. Although her students come to school with "wonderful, rich home language," she says, they often lack experience with "school language"—the language and conventions of print. The books, magazines, newspapers, bedtime stories, and other opportunities that prepare kids to read are missing in many low-income homes. BURSTING
Any deficit in kids’ exposure to "school language" is quickly erased when they come to Chun’s class. Room 7 bursts with written words; the walls drip with print. Hundreds of books, big and small, are crammed into every plastic tub and wooden shelf. Hanging on clotheslines and every available vertical surface are sheets of chart paper covered with hand-printed words. The paper holds the written records of students’ observations on tadpoles and other natural phenomena. It displays light-hearted poems the children recite and study together, circling blends (bl, br, pr) and digraphs (ai, ea, ou), including the "h brothers" (th, ph), with colored markers. There are one-sentence summaries of chapters Chun has read aloud from books such as My Father’s Dragon by Ruth Gannett. There are lists and lists of rhyming words (cat, hat, fat, mat; big, fig, dig, jig). And there is the "pocket chart" —a piece of blue canvas covered with horizontal rows of plastic pockets. Each pocket holds a manila card. Printed on each card is a common word, most with just one syllable (at, be, by, go, see, me, am, good, saw, down). Chun describes this low-tech apparatus as "incredibly important" to her literacy instruction. By letting kids handle and manipulate words, the pocket chart gives her teaching the visual and tactile qualities young children need for learning. "The pocket chart was God’s gift to elementary teachers," Chun says. "I use it constantly." One morning in May, the first-graders read a poem called "Bubble Gum." Children take turns "finger pointing" as they read the words aloud for the rest of the class:
After the students search the poem for words with the long e sound (peeled, between, three), Chun says: "Now, look at the pocket chart. The poem is in the pocket chart. What’s wrong with that poem?" "It’s scrambled!" Levander calls out. "Does it make sense?" the teacher asks. "Does it sound right?" "No!" the children chime. One by one, students go to the pocket chart and rearrange the scrambled lines. Jessica struggles when it’s her turn, trying the words this way and that, while her seated classmates squirm impatiently, calling "Nope!" "Nope!" to her various attempts. With help from Carmella, she finally finds the proper order. Next, Chun sits in a threadbare wing chair, her students clustered at her feet. Holding up a picture book for them to see, she says: "This is the Icky Bug Alphabet Book by Jerry Pallotta. What do you think this book is about?" "Oh, for Pete’s sake, Larry. Did you read this book already?" Chun responds in mock amazement. She reads to them about ants, bees, crickets, and dragonflies. "E is for earwig." "Ooooh," the students groan in disgust. "F is for…you know this bug, too. What’s the bug that lights up?" "Firefly!" they call out in unison. "L is for ladybug. You guys know this one. Gardeners love ladybugs, because…what’s that little green bug they eat? "Aphins?" someone offers. "Aphids," she gently corrects. The bugs inspire lots of comments from the kids, whose recent shared-reading lessons have featured such insect-centered stories as The Very Hungry Caterpillar, The Very Quiet Cricket, and The Grouchy Ladybug, all by Eric Carle. James knows that ants are strong. Jessica thinks the moth’s wings are pretty. Larry once caught a grass- hopper. Nicholas once saw a scorpion sting a fly. "The fly died in two seconds," he volunteers. Chun admits she wouldn’t mind being a queen bee, lounging in the hive while all the other bees buzz to her command. The children return to their seats, each with a big sheet of paper divided into six boxes. Their assignment is to draw the six bugs they liked best in the alphabet book. When they finish drawing, Chun tells them, they may write about the bugs on the back of their paper. Meanwhile, the teacher meets with small groups (she calls them "guided groups") for reading practice. All but four of Chun’s first-graders are reading at or above grade level. Two of her groups, in fact, are reading at second-grade level or higher; with these, she meets twice a week. The other groups—those that are having more trouble—meet daily. Using leveled books such as Tales of Amanda Pig (a Puffin "Easy-to-Read" book), Morris Goes to School (an "I Can Read" book from Harper Trophy), and Hungry, Hungry Sharks (a "Step Into Reading" book from Random House), Chun first reads the story aloud to the group. Then the children read it in chorus. Only after they have heard the story and talked about it does Chun call on them to read aloud by themselves. If a child struggles, Chun pairs her with a stronger reader, and the two read in tandem. As each child reads, Chun keeps an informal "running record" (see Page 40 for a description of a running record), where she notes which words or concepts are stumbling blocks. One of her groups, for example, was tripping over the distinction between the, then, and they. "Look at the end of the word," Chun reminds Terra when the little girl mistakes they for the. "Kids need book language modeled," Chun says. "We spend a lot of time reading aloud. Sharing the book together a few times first helps them with the pattern and the language of the story." Each day, each student takes a copy of his guided-group book home in a zip-lock bag. Their assignment: Read for 20 minutes at home, independently or with a parent. "They really just need a lot of practice," Chun says. "For a few children, reading comes naturally. But for most, it takes a lot of practice, a lot of experience. Parents need to understand that." JUMP
Teaching children to read, says Chun, requires "filling their world with print." For fledgling readers, that print needs to be "patterned, predictable, and repetitive," she says. Jump rope rhymes—those silly, sing-song poems children have jumped to for generations—offer a perfect on-ramp for first-graders’ journey into literacy, Chun has discovered. She begins each year by teaching the rhymes orally—old favorites like this:
Little Arrabella Miller
And like this:
Bee, bee, bumble bee,
After learning the words, clapping the rhythm, and chanting the rhymes while jumping rope on the playground, the students finger-point the rhymes in the pocket chart. Finally, Chun gives each child a rhyme printed on 8 ½'' x 11'' paper, where they finger-point the words and draw pictures to illustrate them. Because jump rope rhymes are rooted in play and physical activity, they are a natural "jump-off point" for young readers, Chun says. In workshops she gives for other teachers, Chun suggests using the rhymes to build such skills as recognizing letters; identifying beginning, middle, and ending consonant sounds; identifying blends and digraphs; locating word endings such as ed and ing; locating rhyming words; and understanding short and long vowel sounds. In those early weeks of autumn, Chun hits hard on the basic concepts of print: directionality (left to right, top to bottom), sentence conventions (initial capital letter and punctuation), letter recognition, and the alphabetic principal (letter-sound relationships). "It takes a lot of pointing out print and bringing it to their attention," she says. After illustrating the classroom collection of jump rope rhymes, Chun’s students write and illustrate their own original stories—stories about building a doghouse or becoming a musician or playing with neighborhood friends. The stories are keyboarded on the computer by the classroom aide and "published" in book form. Stephanie’s story is called All About Bats. It goes like this: "I wonder how bats hang upside down without slipping. Most bats don’t bother people. Bats eat fruit and not people." Christopher titled his book Counting. He writes: "I counted 29 red gnats. I counted 17 green vats. I counted 18 blue rats. I counted 10 purple cats. I counted 8 orange hats. I counted 6 yellow mats. I counted 5 black bats." Levander, who calls his book I Want to Be, writes: "I want to be a singer when I grow up. If I get fired, then I want to be a teacher. I will teach fifth grade and do what is right. The end." When Chun started teaching first grade, she spent a lot of time thinking up prompts for writing. But, she says, "I have found that no prompt works better than a child’s own stories that are in their head." Now, she tells them to "write about your life, write about what you’re good at, write about what you know." She quotes early-literacy expert Lucy Calkins, who says, "We fall in love with our students when we know their stories." "Their stories are fabulous," Chun says. "That’s what first-grade teaching is all about—listening
to their stories."
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Date of Last Update: 9/28/01 
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"The first bug is probably going to start with an A and the next bug starts with a B and on like that," Larry volunteers.
