I was an inner city classroom teacher at a new open space school, part of a fourth grade team consisting of 4 teachers and 100 students. Sixteen of our students could not read even at the 1st grade level. They were all children and of course these students were the ‘behavior problems’. Within the first two weeks of school, many of them were spending more time in the office for behavior referrals than in their classrooms. Instruction was not differentiated by reading levels, so these students were learning very little in materials geared toward a 4th grade reading level.

My background was Alternative Education, and my passion was working with students who were ‘slipping through the cracks’. I suggested to the other three teachers on the team that if they were willing to increase their class sizes, I would keep the 16 non-readers. The other teachers took advantage of the opportunity and the administrator approved. By the third week of school, I had been moved to a small, separate room with the 16 non-readers.

I used some strategies that had been successful in the past. This included “going back to basics”…checking what each child DID know and what the specific gaps were for each student. All children knew the letters of the alphabet and had a beginning understanding of consonant sounds. Each could read only a few words.

We started there, at your level of instruction, with games and activities I created while trying to teach words with the CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) short vowel sound pattern. I was amazed at how difficult it was for these 10 and 11 year olds to put letters and sounds together in this simple CVC pattern.

Now, coincidentally, during this same time period, I was pregnant with my first child. Like many new moms-to-be, I bought a lot of stuff in anticipation of the arrival of my first child.

One night, I bought some simple insert puzzles…the ones with no interlocking pieces. There was a puzzle with vehicles, each one cut to fit into its own space cut out separately, each with a little red knob to manipulate with little hands. Another puzzle had animals, while a third had people.

I realized when I got to work the next morning that I had forgotten to take the bag containing the puzzles out of my car. Because my school was located in a part of town where carjackings were common, the administrator had instructed the staff not to leave anything of value in our cars during the day. I took the puzzle bag into the classroom and put it on the floor next to my desk.

The day passed normally. It was a rainy day, with an indoor recess, and an educational assistant came to my room to monitor the class while I took my 15-minute break.

When I returned at the end of my break, the educational assistant was nowhere to be seen. The boys were all clustered near my desk, sitting on the floor, actively engaged in something. I quickly realized that they had opened the bag from the toy store, opened each of the puzzles, and had the pieces scattered all over the floor.

I was upset… at the assistant who was supposed to be monitoring my class, and at the students, for getting into my personal items and opening puzzles intended for my unborn child. I sternly demanded that the boys put the puzzles back together!
And then I watched in utter amazement, when I realized that none of these fourth graders were able to put the inserted puzzle pieces back in place!

This was one of the Ah-ha! moments of my life. If these kids couldn’t take apart and put together concrete objects as basic as simple embedded puzzles, how on earth could they take apart and put together abstractions like letters and sounds?

Our classroom changed. I kept those puzzles open in the classroom and bought simpler inserted puzzles for my students, as well as easy to interlock puzzles with just a few pieces. The students became adept at taking these puzzles apart and then putting them back together to create a predetermined whole.

I bought blocks for the classroom, which they put together, then took apart, and then put back together in different ways, creating a wide range of things, similar to what we do with letters when we pronounce words.

I created time each day for children to explore and work with these manipulatives, helping them learn to do with these concrete objects what reading requires them to do with the abstractions of letters and sounds.

Some of the children made several years of growth in reading that year. However, I may have learned more as I realized the essential nature of ensuring children are exposed to developmentally appropriate materials.