“Spitting,” her mother responded.
“EWWWWW!” the girl said. After a minute of studying the sign and mouthing “no spitting,” she went on, “You mean some people need to be TOLD that?”, looking at her mother in disbelief. Clearly, this little girl came from a household where nobody had to be reminded that buses were not places to spit.
Her mother replied, “Yes. Some people haven’t been taught not to spit in public.”
A moment of silence passed while the girl absorbed that fact. Then she asked, “Who put that sign on the bus?” The mother explained it probably wasn’t the bus driver, but people who make the rules for the city, including the buses. The girl, New York City kid that she was, announced, “I don’t think a sign will stop people like that from spitting. Some kind of officer on the bus might, but not a sign!” As they departed at the next stop, they left David thinking about their lively exchange.
Why are we telling you this story?
Fueled by her curiosity and the inquisitiveness nurtured by her mother, this preschooler had just engaged in many of the same activities that we use with students to achieve reading comprehension. Let’s take a look at what she did to comprehend the text over the windshield. • First, she “read closely to determine what the text says.” Sound familiar? That’s because it appears in many standards documents and, more importantly, it is what proficient readers do to understand a text’s message: read closely. • Then she asked a clarifying question: “What’s that word after ‘NO’?” After being told the word in question was “spitting,” she scowled and said “EWWWWW!” It’s safe to say she was visualizing, another process that readers naturally do (and that we spend inordinate time trying to teach). • Next, she asked, “You mean some people need to be TOLD that?” Here she was, once again, asking a question, and making a “text to knowledge” connection (e.g., no one in her world would do that).
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INTRODUCTION
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