Schools

Teaching Students To Read By Teaching Them How To Perform

It's an unusual approach, but teachers say it garners results.

Eighteen kids stood, arms at their sides, in an oval in the middle of a first-grade classroom at .

Some did their best impressions of the actor-teacher from Hopkins’ Stages Theater leading the class: shoulders relaxed, head up, eyes attentive. Others, backs ramrod-straight, looked like they were channeling their inner G.I. Joe. A fair proportion twisted and fidgeted and squirmed, eyes turned expectantly towards Jeannine Coulombe, the visiting teacher.

“Okay,” Coulombe said, drawing out the “o” in a long, rising glissando.

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“Show me ‘snuggle!’”

All at once, the students hugged themselves, or plopped to the floor and curled up like tired puppies. Coulombe looked around the room, praising some, and eventually picking one student’s pose—a half-crouch, with the arms wrapped around the chest—for the students to repeat, first in groups, and then in front of each other.

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These first-graders weren’t in an acting class. They, along with their teacher, Mary Malone, were participating in an unusual learn-to-read program being implemented this year in all of Ramsey’s kindergarten and first-grade classrooms. 

It may not look a lot like the reading lessons adults remember, but according to Cassandra Proball, this takes advantage of another way the brain learns.

"Brain research tells us that when working on retention, it's more effective to build multiple pathways to the same point," said Proball, the Stages’ Education Director.

Essentially, if kids associate a not just a shape—the written word—with a particular meaning, but an action, they're that much more likely to remember it. This is why Coulombe was so particular about the gesture that she asked students to learn and repeat in front of other students. It had to be instantly recognizable. Even if a student (say, one of Ramsey's many students who's still learning English) spent most of a lesson mimicking their peers' gestures, Coulombe said, they're still building associations between an English word and its meaning, as expressed through an emotive gesture.

The exercises also have some fringe benefits for Malone, the Ramsey teacher. Beyond learning a new tool for teaching literacy, Malone said, it is helping her identify how her students learn and ways she'll need to individualize her instruction over the course of the year to make sure she's reaching all of them.

"I'm really keen on observing them as learners in this environment," she said, a bit of a thrill evident in her voice. "I see a student who's struggling (in a pen-and-paper exercise), but he excelled in this."

“And that’s hopefully success you can build on,” Coulombe chimed in. “It shows them this (learning to read) is possible for them to do.”


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