As a beginning teacher in the early 1960s, I went into a school district where a basal reading text was handed me. It was Dick, Jane, and Sally. The old “Look, look! Run, run! See, see!” In workbooks the children were to search a page for the words they saw starting with “b.” I was comfortable the first year trying things out, but by the third year of teaching I could see that the program just didn’t meet the needs of all my children, and I was going over things that some of them already knew. So I began to explore other alternatives. I went to lectures at nearby Oakland University. Quite a few reading experts came there from different parts of the country. Bill Martin was one of them. He was the author of the Little Owl books and collections of stories and poems in books and on tapes. Martin had one selection called Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? that first graders absolutely loved. Even twenty years later, it’s still one of their favorites. They would pick up that rhyme and begin to read, “Brown bear, brown bear, what do you see?” “I see a red bird looking at me.” In their own writing at Hallowe’en it became “Orange pumpkin, orange pumpkin, what do you see?” “I see a white ghost looking at me.” One year a mother came in with a little boy from Lebanon who spoke just Arabic and French. He was afraid to try English words in front of us. A couple weeks later his mother and aunt came in and said, “What’s this brown bear?” The boy had come home chanting the lines. In class I noticed that he was really looking at the words in the book while he listened to Bill Martin say them on tape. Another person I learned from at that time was Roach Van Allen, from the University of Arizona. He came in and talked about children writing their own books, and then learning to read them. He also suggested having the children talk about a common experience, which could be written down by the teacher.
Lichens from Iceland in the Collection of Svanhildur Svane
