Over the course of the Spring Quarter, I have been observing an EC2 classroom as students read and interact with wordless picture books with CONNECT Researcher Dr. Christine Lee and Demonstration Teacher Kelly Peters. Wordless picture books are books with little to no words that allow the students to form the stories themselves. The EC2 students used dialogue and narration tools, which were popsicle sticks with images that helped students tell their stories.
Dialogue sticks are blank speech bubbles that allow students to give voice to characters in the story. Similarly, narration sticks have a picture of a person reading to others, which lets students narrate the events of the story.
In my first week in EC2, Ms. Peters read a wordless picture book to the students using the narration stick tool. After the read-aloud, the students were dismissed to read on their own, and a student came up to me. “Can you read with me?” she asked. While using the dialogue and narration sticks, she was relatively quiet and flipped silently through the pages. I had asked a few questions about the pictures, but beyond that, I was also pretty quiet as I was also still learning about wordless picture books.
This became a routine for me, as I continued to be her reading partner over the remainder of the quarter. Every time I went to her classroom, she would stand up, walk over to me, and ask me to be her reading partner. By my fourth week there, she started to ask me questions about my family, home, and job. I reciprocated this and asked her a few questions about herself as well. After this, we shifted our focus back to wordless picture books, and she began to incorporate the dialogue and narration sticks into the stories. With each session, she would talk to me more and more, and increasingly use her voice in the wordless picture books. One time, while reading Fly!, she gave me sound effects and voices to the characters. “Weeeee!” she would have the bird say, as it fell out of the tree.
During the seventh week, I saw that she was sitting with a friend and assumed that they would read together. However, I was surprised when she brought her friend over to me and asked, “Can you read with us?” The three of us then read together, using our fingers now instead of dialogue sticks to mark who was speaking in the book. We read the story Fly! this time too. The students were the voice of the baby bird and the voice of the mama bird. As the baby bird, she mischievously said, “Maybe I could do this. Maybe I could do that.” “Maybe I could ride a bike.” On one page, where the baby bird was falling, she traced her finger down the page. “Now I’m going down.”
Throughout my time at CONNECT, I found that wordless books helped mediate the building of our relationship; the activity of wordless books helped us open up to one another. As we read more books together, we have grown to interact more when reading stories and learn more about each other. Wordless books allowed agency over how kids read, as they can include sound effects, dialogue, and narration as they see fit, which resulted in students having agency in how they wanted to interact with me. It also gave us a chance to get to know one another through these stories and characters.
I am grateful to the EC2 students for being my reading partner every week, as they allowed me to understand the importance of building a connection with students. Working with EC2 showed me the different ways we can connect and communicate with students beyond conversation.
Abby Runyen is a fourth-year undergraduate student from the East Bay Area, with a major in Education & Social Transformation and a minor in Applied Developmental Psychology. She aspires to become an TK or Kindergarten teacher in the near future and has an interest in working with and uplifting young children.
Questions about this blog post can be directed to Dr. Christine Lee (clee@labschool.ucla.edu).