By Laura Goods
“I want to save the bees,” said one of my students.
My class had been brainstorming for about two weeks, trying to choose a “real-world” issue that was affecting our local community just outside of Calgary. I wanted to make learning relevant to the students’ lives by finding a compelling topic to base a small portion of the reading curriculum around. At the same time, the Canadian news media were covering the decline of the bee population. There was talk about banning pesticides and a lot of people, including parents, were worried about the outcome.
All the students quickly got on board with saving the bees. I spent the entire year teaching them everything we could learn about the fuzzy yellow pollinators. Making models of bees, studying the science behind pesticides, and reading news articles are some examples of how “bee-mania” took over my classroom. Beyond the excitement, the project checked a lot of boxes for the Alberta ELA curriculum, developing comprehension, expanding academic vocabulary, and strengthening the students’ ability to read about real-world issues.
Most of the information about bees came from scientific articles I found online. I would pour over the academic texts at night in order to simplify them for my students, who were always excited to read these articles together the next day. They would then split off into their differentiated reading groups to re-read the material and discuss.
Even though we hadn’t yet been trained on the Science of Reading when I taught the bee unit, it has since become the guiding light for teaching literacy. Its strategies have been tried, tested, studied, and proven. What I learned after teaching the bee unit is that the many of the ways I made it accessible were anchored in Science of Reading principles. Here’s how.
1. Starting with a Placement Test
The Science of Reading focuses on how to differentiate lessons to target each student’s area of needs, so identifying those needs right from the start is critical. During the bee unit, I relied on a reading assessment performed at the beginning of the year so I knew my students’ individual reading levels. With that information, I was able to create guided reading groups and then assign reading take-homes that were tailored to each groups’ reading level.
Having that early assessment—and with periodic assessments throughout the year to re-level students—ensured everyone was always being challenged just the right amount.
(Note: Assessmentes are great, but having access to an online progress monitoring tool is even better. Being able to have weekly or daily insight to what parts of a lesson are resonating or areas of struggle allow for quicker intervention on my part. Reading Eggs is a tool that my school utilizes to further implement targeted instruction on exactly what students are missing, including comprehension strategies. It can be done at home as a fun “homework assignment” or assigned in class as a station.)
2. Meeting Students Where They Are
I needed to be sure that none of my students were discouraged from reading during the unit because frankly, the information was complex. Fortunately, they were all extremely invested in saving the bees, and this gave them enough motivation to struggle through even the trickier articles.
I made sure that all of the difficult words could be sounded out, and I reminded students that this was a great opportunity to ask a peer or myself for help if there was something they didn’t understand in the reading. I even created differentiated versions for every level of reader I had in my classroom that year, making adjustments in the texts ranging from simple CVC (consonant, vowel, consonant) words to highlighted scientific terms, like “pollinate.” I also changed verbs from complex to simple: like replacing “traverse” with “fly.”
Nowadays, there are online programs (like Reading Eggs) that can do this for you, offering targeted, differentiated lessons and readings based on the student’s areas of need, whether comprehension, fluency, phonemic awareness, or vocabulary. These programs respect a student’s privacy and let them focus on the particular skills they need to develop, without worrying what level other students are at, ultimately helping them stay engaged through content that is just right for them.
3. Finding Their Passion
Giving students ownership and finding a subject they are passionate about can be a stark reminder that kids who are excited by the material engage more deeply and retain lessons better.
A classroom of fully engaged students is every teacher’s dream, and every teacher’s struggle. I included the students in determining our year-end project because their own curiosity and interests, I hoped, would maintain their engagement. For the rest of the year, I saw students actively engaging others in conversation about bees, or sitting by themselves focused on each new reading assignment.
At the end of the project, we wrote letters to the Health Minister of Canada asking them to ban one of the pesticides known to cause harm to the bee population: imidacloprid (which, I might point out, is itself a whole culmination of syllabication and letter sounds). My students had read about its adverse impact on surrounding ecosystems, and they had a clear understanding of the role bees play in pollinating food crops and flowers. When they began to compose their letters, they were well prepared.
I had one student at this time who was a very reluctant writer. Despite being a passionate reader, she hated the writing process and struggled with simple sentences. But she was especially inspired by the bee unit and put a lot of hard work into writing her letter.
A few months after the letters had been mailed, each of the students received a response! They were absolutely thrilled, and so proud of themselves and each other. The pesticide was banned for use in Canada that very summer, and at the start of the next school year, all my former students came to me full of excitement that their letters had been a part of something so important and successful. They felt empowered.
Best of all, my student who struggled so much with writing had finally found her voice. Her mother and I still keep in contact and from time to time she reminds me how important the bee project had been to her daughter, showing her how powerful writing can be. To this day, that student still writes letters about topics that are important to her.
Giving my students the opportunity to have their words mean something has been the best thing I’ve ever done as a teacher.
At the end of that year, I watched as my students left our hive, and wondered how many bee facts they might remember later on in life. But the facts aren’t nearly as important as the students’ experiences or the skills they gained.
One thing I am certain of is that each of my students left with the greatest gift I could give them: the joy of reading and newfound confidence in their skills.
Laura Goods is a third-grade teacher in Calgary, AB.