And after reading with Anna, I love him even more.
Trying to read the book independently, Anna came into the living room crying. She didn't understand a thing. And after reading aloud with her, I understood why. Here are some of the moments that brought me joy.
"On the dashboard in front of him, Brian saw dials, switches, meters, knobs, levers, cranks, lights, handles that were wiggling and flickering, all indicating nothing that he understood and the pilot seemed the same way. Part of the plane, not human" (Hatchet, p. 3).
It wasn't too much later that I realized Anna felt the same way about reading. On the paper unfolded before her, Anna saw letters, words, syllables, lines, paragraphs, quotes, and page after page that were confusing and fickle, all indicating nothing that she understood and the joy of it seemed the same way. Part of the book, not herself.
As we read, I realized that there were patterns in her confusion.
Multiple meaning words and context:
"He had never flown in a single-engine plane before and to be sitting in the copilots seat with all the controls right there in front of him, all the instruments in his face..." (pg. 2).
Anna interrupted.
"Nona, what in the world are instruments doing in his face? I thought he was in a plane." Anna didn't have the schema or vocabulary for a single-engine plane. Just like Brian, the experience was foreign. She was using her existing schema and strategies to understand, but the cognitive dissonance and mental image of a violin in Brian's face wasn't quite working for her. While reading alone, she didn't have the resources to realize why it wasn't making sense. She thought the problem was with her.
I pulled out my phone and googled pictures of a single-engine plane. We pointed and talked about the cockpit and then arranged ourselves on the couch as if I were the pilot and she were Brian. As we read, we each played our part - making the actions or facial expressions indicated by the text.
But I can't tell you how many times the multiple meaning words have interfered: nose (of the plane), calf (with the porcupine quills), belt (of bushes around the lake), chip (in the ax), weak (sparks), and so on. She began to learn to stop and ask some questions when her mental image didn't match the context.
Prosody:
The most interesting experience, however, was Palusen's way of "speaking," his voice, his long sentences, his short ones, his clauses within clauses, his dashes. The authentic way we speak and think doesn't match the simple sentence patterns we learn about in grammar. And Paulsen doesn't patronize us with such limiting syntax. But this requires a nuanced understanding of phrasing and emphasis that Anna didn't know how to do.
I often begin teaching prosody to adults by sharing this sentence.
THE OLD MAN THE BOAT.
Some will tell me that it isn't a sentence, but a list of two things: a man and a boat. If the sentence is not read with prosody, it makes no sense.
The old (as in old people) man (as in navigate) the boat.
That's a sentence.
And it doesn't make much sense without prosody. The same thing happens when kids are reading. Often, we can tell if they understand what they are reading by what they are stressing and how they are phrasing and chunking pieces of the text together. Here are some of the phrases that jumped out at us:
Prosody with Modifiers:
"One of the pilots, a woman, had found some kind of beans on a bush and she had used them with her lizard..." (pg. 61). Anna's voice went down to end the sentence. "With her lizard" was a completely logical semantic unit.
"Nona! Why would she use the beans with her lizard?"
I chuckled. "You phrased that exactly right." I repeated what she had read. "But sometimes, the way you make your voice sound doesn't make sense when you read the next word. Listen: 'One of the pilots, a woman, had found some kind of beans on a bush and she had used them with her lizard meat to make a little stew in a tin can she had found. Bean lizard stew.'" And of course, we laughed.
It happened again a few pages later. We had been trading every other sentence. This time I was reading. "The pain had gone from being a pointed injury..." my voice trailed off and then I saw the next word: pain. Injury was modifying pain, not serving as the noun! I started the sentence over and read, "The pain had gone from being a pointed injury pain to spreading in a hot smear up his leg and it made him catch his breath."
"Nona! You mean even you say stuff wrong when you read?" Yes, dear. I do.
Prosody with Punctuation:
"He didn't want to be away from his - he almost thought of it as home - shelter when it came to be dark." Sometimes, Anna, the author is surprised by something he is thinking in the middle of his thought. He uses dashes to show this revelation. It's kind of like an interruption. I read the thought aloud and then asked her to read the interruption and then I finished the sentence. Every time we saw one of those dashes after that, we started trading voices to emphasize the phrasing, the interruption.
Putting Prosody and Monitoring for Word Meaning Together:
After Brian's interaction with the porcupine, he has a dream that he can't interpret. I knew that we had the evidence we needed to come to the conclusion Brian was about to discover before Paulsen revealed it. We stopped after this sentence: "Something came then, a thought as he held the hatchet, something about the dream and his father and Terry, but he couldn't pin it down." Anna had been struggling to understand the dream earlier and I pushed her.
"Anna, we have what we need to figure this out." I started to flip backward to reread the paragraph where Brian throws the hatchet and the sparks fly. She groaned in disappointment, "Again? Uggh."
And then something magical happened. You can hear it here: start at 15:50 and listen to about 17:20. Then skip to 20:00 and listen until you hear her figure it out.
Anna: [Gasps]
Me: What just happened in your mind just now.
Anna: He wants to have a fire.
Anna: But he doesn't have it
Anna: He doesn't know how to make it.
Anna: That's all.
Anna: I know he doesn't know what his dad was doing.
Me: What happened when he threw the ax...
Anna: [MAGIC HAPPENS]
I knew then that she was ready to read the next chapter on her own. We watched a couple of videos about starting a fire, previewed a few words, and I set her off to read on her own. It wasn't much longer until she bounded back into the living room, pages of the book flapping like brittle kindling, her face burning with the joy of chapter nine.
No comments:
Post a Comment