Reading in Third Grade

I was working with a student – a brilliant student. They literally shimmer, and I feel privileged to be able to work with them each week. When we’re together we spend most of our time looking at words, writing, and considering the tens, ones, and hundreds places, and how numbers expand and contract. They are in third grade.

“I don’t like reading.” They tell me one day. It’s been years that we have worked together with joy around the books we’ve read. We’ve laughed at silly books and considered animals in various research projects. Not liking reading was never really part of the conversation. But this student is feeling the pressure of comprehending, and explaining their texts, seeing the rising differences between the students in her classroom that comes with age. There is a bit of an identity crisis that can happen in third grade. I could probably go into all that students are dealing with right now. But this transitional period stands is firm, at least for now, as they settle in the middle of elementary school, and I have found that this conundrum of in-betweenness can pretty profoundly come through when it comes to reading.

So reading with third graders: when they gloss and skim, when they hide their uncertainty is mumbles, or, sometimes reading into their snacks so that we don’t hear their insecurities, when they express their frustrations: it’s real. A third grader struggle with a new responsibility in the world they have reached through experience and development. According to the book Yardsticks by Chip Wood an educator and co-developer of the Responsive Classroom, eight and nine year olds *generally* move from an excitable, though a bit overwhelmed eight, to a more brooding nine year old. The nine year old is beginning to understand the complexities of the world, and interested, on a deeper level, to engage with it. Of course, these are generalizations, but developmental Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget called this the concrete operational phase, meaning, they are able to apply reasoning to and logic to concrete events, deepening their ability to analyze.

Above all, when a child is saying “I don’t like to read” they are speaking to their sense of justice, and placing themselves in relationship with their alignment. They are learning who they are in the world, and seeing how it feels. Take them seriously, listen to their reasons why, and ask how you can work together.

Then get to the business of finding appropriate books for their level.

Slow down.

Break words apart.

Find alternative texts, things that talk about things the child is interested in.

Show them how much they have accomplished with each meeting.

A child who doesn’t like to read is experiencing something true and real about themselves and about the world. While doing the work of teaching reading, encourage the students to expand upon those underlying reasons. An eight and nine year old is asking for your attention. Listen and adjust, and then move through it. We must face things we do not like, or think we don’t like. It’s our job as teachers to hold that line for a student between giving them the chance to elaborate on their feelings, and then move on. One must read the texts they think are boring. They may find, all at once, they are able to read, and maybe, with a bit of searching and with age, they will able to find on their own what texts they can align themselves with.