Lois Letchford: Short Talk at the Albany Public Library

I've been teaching struggling reading for the last 20 years, and I started with one boy who was a total nightmare for the school. And then we moved to Lubbock, Texas, and I became the district reading specialist, and I went from school to school to school teaching children who'd failed reading programs. So you get a really good percentage of children who, you know, this is what I've got to do.

So you've got a good sample.

So that's my background, and I you know we've lived on three continents. So you really take a big breath. You can't even see that. Can you read it?

A little bit.

I'll read it. I'll read it. I'll read it. Well, I try and say it. You know, Anton Leeuwenhoek was Dutch. He sold pincushions, cloth, and such. The waiting townsfolk. Tuned and fussed as Anton's dry goods gathered dust. Instead of tending store, he looked— some of the things he— so instead of tending store, he worked instead at grinding lenses for a microscope. So some of the things he looked at were mosquito wings, the hairs of sheep, the legs of lice, the skin of people, dogs, and mice, oxidised spider spinning gear, a little smear of his own blood, and best of all— A little smear of your own blood. Best of all, the very— the unknown busy, very small things that swim and jump and hop inside a simple water drop. Impossible! much Dutchmen said. That Anton's crazy in the head. We ought to ship him off to Spain. He said he's seen a housefly's brain. He says the water that we drink is full of bugs. He's mad, we think. They called him Dummkopf, which means dope. That's how we got the microscope. So my question is, you know, what questions would you come up with a poem like this? So it's interactive. Thank you for coming.

No problem.

What questions would you come up with upon looking?

I think when people don't understand the pursuits of others, maybe, or, you know, what, what someone else is working on, they may be quick to judge. And usually that comes in like a group setting, you know, it's kind of This guy over here, he's looking through a lens and saying he sees all these things that he's professing to us, but he must be— he's got to be crazy because this is nothing that we know. It's not truth. So, right? That's what I think.

Yeah, absolutely right. Do you think the poem's true?

That he could be looking through a microscope? Yes, it's definitely true that that— Is what he's doing. And instead of just saying, I looked through a microscope, he gave them intimate, specific details of what he was doing. So I think that might have kind of thrown them off because they probably, you know, a person could probably say, why didn't you just say you were looking through a microscope instead of telling me each and every intimate detail? Let me ask you what you're doing with the microscope and then you can tell me the intimate details.

So meaning, is it fact or fiction?

Yes, yes, is it fact or fiction? Is it fact or fiction?

It sounds to me, you know, it's believable. It could be fact, but I'll say fiction.

What do you think?

I feel like it is fact. I think it's somebody with a microscope just instead of saying, I want— I'm reading under a microscope, I'm telling you all the intimate details. And I'm basically prettying it up for you, hoping that you like the fact that I've prettied it up for you.

But what can we tell from it? We know that as a man, we know his name, we know his nationality. What do you think? And it says, you know, he sold pincushions, cloth and such. What do you think that's saying?

He was an ordinary, maybe sales— salesman type individual.

Yeah, merchant. And it's true. was the first man who actually ground lenses for a microscope. And his idea of grinding lenses was that he was counting cloth, like, you know, we can have thread counts on sheets. He was counting it, and he was what, early 1600s?

Mm-hmm.

He actually did all of this stuff, and he got excited by seeing things get bigger and bigger and bigger. And he, his work was to the British Library and he became— before Hook and Boyle even started, this was the guy who started it. So it is fact.

Mm-hmm.

And I like it because it gets my children thinking. And, and then for children who are struggling, you've also got the rhyming words, but you can also create pictures for each of the things that he has done. And they did think the guy's crazy because of course water's got nothing in it. So, and that's how I get my children thinking when I'm starting to learn about reading, or learning about reading. Then I've got this next poem that I need, um, this is one of my favourites, one of my favourites, and it's Furniture Bash. The hand of the clock pinched the foot of the bed, so the foot of the bed kicked the seat of the chair, so the seat of the chair sat on the head of the table, so the head of the table bit the leg of the desk, so the leg of the desk bumped the arm of the couch, so the arm of the couch slapped the face of the clock, and they pinched and they punched and they banged and they knocked and they ripped and they flipped And they rolled and they rocked, and the poor dresser drawers got a couple of socks. There was sawdust and springs when I turned on the light after that horrible furniture fight. And that's the truth, no lie, no joke. That's how your furniture all got broke. So what's the complexities of that one?

There's a lot more people downstairs that are just laddering around. I'm wondering if they could maybe come up. So I went down and talked to them about if they could make an announcement, and the librarian in charge can make the announcement. So he's just going to make an announcement just in case. Okay, just to see if we can get more people.

Thank you, Isaac. Are they, are they wanting to, or would they be interested in?

Well, some of them are in reading, the reading section, so I don't know.

Oh, okay. Anyway, with this poem for my students They're looking for a picture for each word as opposed to a picture for hand of the clock and foot of the bed. They won't, you know, we don't use those terms anymore. Agree or not? Or do you use them? Well, I do say foot of the bed. You say foot of the bed?

I do say foot of the bed.

What about seat of the chair? You're sitting on it.

No, I have no idea what seat of the chair is.

And head of the table?

Yeah, head of the table.

I think that's one that's gone too. The leg of the desk we use, don't we? Or the desk leg. The arm of the couch.

Yeah.

You're sitting on the arm of the couch. And then the face of the clock we certainly say. So my children, when I'm teaching the strugglers, they tend to see one word, one picture, and not see that combining how words Sit as phrases to get one picture. So I've got to do a lot of work on that. And the last one, the last little poem, is a little poem that I wrote that causes my students lots of problems. So I make it very easy for them. So what I do is I simply— we act it out. We acted out and we put down. You know what have we got? I asked them to be, you know, I'm a cat or a rat or a bat. So one of them will take each each student will take one part. Oh, there it is.

Attention library patrons. I would like to draw your attention to the second floor community room rental offer. Lois Letchford. Having a reading and thinking program for parents, folks who are around 2 to 3, they can come up this way.

Yeah, that's very nice. And then I put a mat down. That's my mat. And then we need a hat because that's what the poem says. And then I have my students take the part. What happens when we step into the mat? And that's when they start to recognize What's happened, because in the middle that's not possible between— well, it's just not possible. There might be one scratched cat, no battle back. That's where the inference is, and you've got to see that those animals put together in a hat would be a mess, and it wouldn't happen. So there's And then you end up with the fight, and then I get my students to rewrite the poem.

Okay.

So that they have ownership of the poem and they'll be able to explore it. Anyway, any thoughts or comments?

Just, um, nope, I need to know more because I want to see how this approach is different than what My kids are learning now because right now their reading and their approach to reading has a lot to do with annotating, annotating, annotating. And I didn't grow up annotating, but I love reading.

Mm-hmm.

And they do annotate, and I think it's taking the fun out of reading for the kids. So I just want to see how this is different than that. If this can be incorporated into that so that I can do that with them.

Yeah, I'm working with the school for a very long period of time, so I'm starting right at the beginning, and the poetry I use varies depending on my students, the age of the students. So, but you, you hit on You know, you're right, they're losing the enjoyment of reading because then we have to, we have to read this and then we have to do that. I like doing this, but I hate doing that.

Right.

And that's a struggle that you have. And I don't, I mean, that's, I don't know how to get around that when you're being told this is what you have to do.

Right.

Except I do a lot more listening. So because you listen at a higher level, Okay. Yeah, so, so, you know, so mine is totally at the other end. But what I do is tell you the little story of how I began with this, because it's the little guy on the left who was 6, who went to school in Australia in 1994, and it only took the teacher one week to say, well, you know, he can't do a thing, he's so far behind, he's just absolutely hopeless.

Mm-hmm.

And at the end of the year then, the teacher shouted at him all year, I dressed him for school every day, he bit his fingernails to the quick every day, and he wet his pants every day. And the prognosis for such children is very poor. At the end of the year he then gets tested, so they say, you know, he's what, he can't do anything, he's got no strengths, He's got— he can read 10 words and he's got a low IQ.

Mmm.

So there's nothing going for him, really. And that's the problem. And when that's the idea, that's the diagnosis, it makes it very hard to get out of that bin. Except our family was privileged and my husband's a professor, so we went overseas for 6 months and we went to Oxford in the second half of 1995. And I took Nicholas on myself. And of course you begin with— I took a series of books called Success for All, which were a total disaster because again it's isolated words, asking him to read isolated words, isolated words, and he couldn't do it. So I started then to write poems, and this was one of the first poems that I wrote for him. And not only are you writing it using rhyming words, but you're also— He's He was illustrating the poems, and that was his illustration. So when you're annotating, what else can we do besides annotating to make kids enjoy?

If they probably added a project to go along with it to kind of, you know, emphasize what they were reading, if they honestly had time to, you know, incorporate that into their learning, it would probably Probably help a lot.

Enhance comprehension and enhance the activity. So that was the start of it. And then you come up with these double O's, double O words, and they come up in the words cook, look, and book. And I then wrote a poem about— do you know Captain Cook at all, Murphy?

I don't remember it, but—

Yeah, but he was the last of the great explorers who completed the mapping of Australia. And so the poem— and we're Australian, so the poem was really important to Nicholas, that it's, you know, he had a notion there was a gap in the map, there's a great big ocean. He took a look without the help of anyone, hoping to find it by having a look. And then we found a map which said, look, Nicholas, there's no Australia. There's a gap in the map. And this took Nicholas, this kid with supposedly low IQ, on a search for... Australia. Australia. Australia. And he said to me, who came before Captain Cook? And I thought, oh, it's easy, Christopher Columbus. And then he said, who came before Columbus? And I'm saying, I don't know who came before Columbus. And we found a map. This was a map. Any idea when that would have been printed? Before Columbus. Look at it, Isaac.

Yeah, no, we have it.

And, and this doesn't— this isn't showing up here. You can see by the east coast of Australia is still not mapped, and that's an indicator of how— when it was printed. But I was amazed. This was one of the— one of the latest maps that Cook had when he left for Australia in 1769. And it rocked me that they knew this much about the west coast of Australia and northern Australia. What they didn't know was up here, what we now know as Cape York Peninsula. They thought— they didn't know if it was sets of islands because Indonesia is 5,000 islands, and they didn't know if this was more islands or how it worked. So they just joined it up to New Guinea, and Indonesia's a bit further north. But they had a fair idea of the west coast, but they didn't have a clue about the east coast. And so that was, that was Columbus— sorry, that was Captain Cook. And the guy who came before Columbus was 1,000 years before, over 1,000 years before, a guy named Ptolemy. And he'd actually never left the shores of Alexandria in Egypt. And he drew this map, and it was one of the world's first maps that we had.

Mm-hmm.

And he put north at the top of the map, and you can see there's lines of latitude and the lines of longitude which he created, and there's an equator. But he didn't know what came further south of that. And because we were in Oxford, you know, we go to the Bodleian Library and say, could we— where would we see the Ptolemy map? And the lady reaches down behind the counter Picks up a book and says, this is a book of Ptolemy maps, that'll be £5 please. So we walked out with a book of Ptolemy maps for this child with supposedly low IQ. Anyway, so we returned to Australia and I, I was delighted what Nicholas had achieved in Oxford and he was reading all the poems, he's asking these questions. He was asking questions. He learned that he could learn, which was huge. And then I go to the diagnostician and I said, you know, Nicholas has done really well. And the first thing she said, well, the reading teacher's tested him and said he's gone backwards. And I— and then she said, well— no, and I said, you know, well, yeah, he learned about Captain Hook and the rest of it, asked these wonderful questions. Well, she said, He's the worst child I've seen in 20 years of teaching.

Hmm.

So that was her statement. I was taken aback. I walked out of the office with my tail between my legs. But it wasn't long before I came back and I said to her, call this kid whatever you like. If he is the worst child you've seen in 20 years of teaching, don't expect him to learn like everyone else. And that became my mantra for teaching my son. Change it. He will learn it. He's capable of learning it. We just got to get him to do it. So that's what I did, and that's where I started from. And so, oh, oh, oh, oh, I think I've pressed the wrong button. Okay. And I'm coming to the conclusion how much Teaching children learns to read depends on these, these first 3 things anyway. The way we think about children. This child's the worst child I've seen in 20 years of teaching, he's not going to learn. We need active learners, which is what we've done in Oxford. He was an active, engaged learner. And then we're playing with the poetry, the reader's theatre, and playing with words to lead to student success. So what I did from that was I have a box. I do a lot of things with boxes. And so here, do you want to work with me with this? I'll show you what we do. This is what I do, you know, at the other end of the scale, because most children learn these things with ease. My students don't. And then once we teach them, once we change how we teach, we change the outcomes and basically getting them to think. So would you like to start?

Sure.

So there's a box, and then you can do the next page. So what you've got to— what do you got to do?

Find the block, place the block on the table, find the rock.

Okay, what do you got to do? It'll be in here. You got to open the box. You got to do something.

Find the block.

I think it died. Find the block.

Yeah.

There's the block.

Yeah.

Find the rock.

There's the rock. Put the rock on the block. Find the sock. You can block the hole in the box with the sock.

You can block the hole in the box with the sock. Oh, can you? Yes, yes, you can. Good.

Find the lock. Can you unlock it? No, you can't because the keys are stuck to it. You can't really do that. Find the knock on the door sign. There's a knock on the door sign. It says, do not knock on the door.

One? There's another one and it says sign, so there's a couple of them.

Okay, which knock sign do you like the best? Do not knock on the door. Um, knock on the door and say please let me in. Knock on the door. Okay, so there must be a door in here someplace. Okay, there is no door in here.

So what would you think you'd have to do?

Um, I'm going to use the table because I don't think there's a door.

Perfect, except you could go to, you know, when it's with my students, I would expect them to get up and go to the front door and actually knock because I want them to Connect. I'm speaking these words, I'm reading words, this requires an action.

Okay.

So that's how I go. Will, your turn. So that's how, that's how I teach.

Okay.

Alright, so there's another—

Whoops, whoops, whoops, whoops.

And we're getting these made smaller. Yeah.

Alright, starting with 13.

Yep.

Alright, find pictures of clocks.

Ah, perfect.

All right, so I think it's going to be one. Which clock is the grandfather clock?

Oh, I didn't print out the grandfather clock one. Oh, that's crazy, isn't it?

Okay, sorry.

Which clock is the cuckoo clock? It's that one. Which clock would say tick-tock, tick-tock? That would probably be the grandfather clock. Which clock would say cuckoo? That'd be the cuckoo clock.

And yeah.

Find the picture of the rocking horse, put it on the table. So I saw him in there, and there he is. So we'll put him on the table. Does the rocking horse rock? We can make him rock. Yeah. Find the picture of a flock of birds. So flock of birds. Yes. So have you seen a flock of birds? I have seen a A flock of birds.

Did they ever look like that?

Um, I don't know if I've seen that many.

We lived in Lubbock, Texas, and the Canada geese would come there, and sometimes there would be 100,000 geese.

No kidding.

And the sky would be black. It's like they're practicing flying.

Amazing. Can you block the doorway to the room you're in? So I could, I could stand in the door.

Perfect, yes.

Can you sing Rock Around the Clock? And I do know that song, so—

Oh, I did. This is, and this is how I start before I've even, before I've done anything. And the top, the list of words isn't there. I make them into word puzzles so the students have And then they do that. And what becomes really important is I've only got one word it on there, but my students— can you unlock it?— wouldn't. I mean, they might be able to do this one, but often when it comes to it, they haven't worked out that they then have to go back to the lock to find the it, you know. And so you're searching for those anti-sittings all the time. Yeah. And there's the rock around the clock style. So, and then this is the other part that I do for my kids, is look at these words and work out which words are words with multiple meanings, and then which words are pronouns, because it's not the reading of the word that's causing the problem, but working out how it works in oral language and how it changes in written language. And when you're looking for antecedents and particulars. He comes to me with his list of cartwheel things. And I say to him, read the list of words. So he reads it. And I say, now give me a sentence with the word 2. And he says, I am 2 years old. And I said to him, you're not 2 years old. So I start, I start writing a poem So that he's seeing how the word T-O sounds and how it changes and how many meanings we've got. So that was the poem we wrote, as— and I sat there with him, so it's then, I'm not 2 years old, but I have 2— and I'm saying, 2 eyes, what else have you got? And then he starts to come out. It's quite a different thing to say, here's a poem, read it. Than to sit with the child and say, let's work through this. And it's far more effective when you're working with them to come up with something like that. And then you end up with, at the end, as one fantastic reader, which becomes the important thing that you're focusing on there. And then you give them the other 2. This box is— or you write a letter, and I write a letter. This letter is to my mother, to my teacher, And then we write it on the front, to, and then on the other side, from. So they're using oral language all the time. Particularly one where you've got dialogue and that kids love and it makes you laugh, it encourages rereading, it encourages expression, it encourages fluency. And then the key is performing it because you can't get away with stumbling over words. And then you've got to work out either, I don't know that word, How can I change it or how can I learn it? So that always evolved in the process. And I wanted to go back to my— this boy Nicholas, because Nicholas lived on 3 continents. He did well in Australia. We left when he was 11 and we moved to Lubbock, Texas. And in Lubbock, Texas, he went from the bottom to the top. He graduated in the top 20% of his high school class. He won a Yes I Can Award. Yes, I can. He won 2 awards for exceptional children that year, 2007, for academics. And when we went back to University of Tasmania and he did 2 undergraduate degrees, took 5 and a half years to do them, an honours degree in mathematics and an honours degree in engineering. If you give a child the chance, then they can achieve whatever they like. So that was my story. That's what I—