At the Houston airport on my way to Guatemala, I picked up a couple of children’s books in Spanish: Curious George & Charlotte’s Web. I read Charlotte’s Web as a kid and read it to my 3rd graders a few years ago. It’s a flawless piece of literature. Not one bad note in the whole narrative. I wondered how Guatemalan kids would relate (or not) to a story about a pig, talking spider, and a girl on a New England farm.
Before sharing it with the students, I spent a lot of time with my Spanish-English dictionary translating the first couple of chapters. It was amazing how my process of deciphering the Spanish text mirrored the process we teach our students to implement: using context clues within the sentence/paragraph, looking at the pictures, etc. It was slow-going and my perfectionist side made it doubly so. I wanted to be sure I knew what every word meant.
Last week, we started reading Charlotte’s Web to my first class. At the end of class, we push our desks to the walls, put our seats in a circle, and pass around the book. I begin by reading a paragraph or two (I need practice too!) and then pass it to them. They read it much better than me, by the way.
Ever since our first day with the book, I always get at least one student saying, “Leeremos Carlota?” (Are we going to read Charlotte’s Web?). I don’t know what they like most about it: the story, the act of reading in aloud, or the novelty of sitting together in a circle and enjoying a book.
These kids really get into reading. Anytime they finish an assignment, they ask me if they can read. We have a basket full of books to choose from, and they never get tired of exploring them. The picture above is of three of my students sharing a book during recess (and eating mangoes). This happens a lot, particularly with the girls. The boys are pretty content playing soccer, tag, marbles, etc.
