In an effort to stay involved with schools and students in my local community, I went to nyc.serve.gov to find more volunteer opportunities. During my search I found a small non-profit that has run a reading program in a few schools in the city. They happened to be working with a school in Brooklyn and needed volunteers. I was excited to have found the opportunity and decided that I would chronicle this experience as well.I met the coordinator to get a quick overview of the classroom and where the materials were located and before I knew it, we were picking up one of my students. She looked so happy to come out of class. She chatted easily with the volunteer coordinator, who accompanied me, about Transformers (the movie) and Alvin and the Chipmunks. I found myself a little rusty, following the coordinators lead and asking about likes and dislikes. Somehow talking to students is always so much more intimidating than speaking with adults. Will they like me? Will I be interesting to them? Can I make a connection?When we got back to the classroom, I gave my student (let's call her Sienna) the option to pick a book, she selected the first one she saw about kids around the world. The school had asked the coordinators to choose non-fiction texts due to the looming state tests. Upon hearing this, I felt complicit in this forced non-fiction book selection. Of course it was important for students to experience a genre of varieties, but at the expense of what? I digress.Sienna was enthusiastic at first about alternating readers. She read the first page and then I read the next page and it went like that. However, after two or three pages, she asked if we could draw. I didn't want to discourage her so soon after meeting her so I grabbed scrap paper and colored pencils. As we moved to the next page of reading I asked her to read the next page about a kid from Nunuvat and then she chose to draw a picture of a snow mobile. When I asked her "what is a snow mobile?" she was able to answer me but in a very vague way. She wanted to stick to drawing but I convinced her with a little pushing that we should keep reading.As she read I observed that when she encountered familiar words she read quickly but when it came to words that required sounding out she wouldn't even look at the word, she would glance away and then just say some syllables trying to match the beginning sounds. So for a word like "Nunuvat" she would just say "Nu waaa?" and look back at me. Any time I tried to get her to look at the word, she got listless. I could tell it wasn't the first time someone asked her to "sound out" the syllables. I tried to keep her engaged by asking her questions about what we were reading. For example when she read about the boy from Tanzania who lived near zebras, lions, etc, I said "what does a lion look like? Have you seen one? What about a zebra?"I also tried to ask questions about the text specifically, to evaluate comprehension, which is one of the main goals of the reading program. When I did I noticed that she was able to observe when the answer wasn't quite right and then, just as she's been taught, she would start reading small excerpts from the text until she got the question right.We got through the book, which described briefly six kids but she seemed increasingly disinterested in discussing the book. She asked a few times if it was lunch, time to go and also kept closing her eyes. I struggled to find ways to keep her interested in the text and from losing her interest all together.Given that it was day one together, I switched to asking her more about herself and telling her about myself. I now know that she loves math,science and Dora the Explorer. She explicitly mentioned that she doesn't like reading. I told her a few things about myself and was happy to hear she found it surprising I was older than 20.We never got to the reading response activity that we were meant to accomplish by the end of our time together. However, there would always be next week.My questions:

• How do you motivate a reader who even at such a young age has become discouraged with the process?
• How does the relationship between reader and teacher (in this case me) play into the reading process?
• Are there ways for me to change this paradigm for her? Or is my lack of knowledge on this topic only making things worse?
• Who will ultimately be responsible for her fluctuating ability to read more challenging words and texts?
• If she finds third grade challenging in terms of text, what happens in fourth grade?

There are so many more questions, but I will reserve them for a future post.