By Suzanne Thompson, Times Staff Writer
It’s a daily challenge for Carol Monacella, Tyl Middle School’s librarian: how to get 10- to 13-year-old kids to read.
Blame it on TV, the craze for anime, the Japanese-inspired cartoon books, or other distractions facing “tweeners” these days. The Connecticut Mastery Test (CMT) scores for Montville middle-schoolers show a low performance in reading, especially among boys. Baseline classroom testing has shown similar results, according to the school.
In 2007, only 20 percent of the town’s sixth-graders admitted to participating in the Governor’s Summer Reading Program. Educators worry that students lose ground in reading and writing abilities when they take a break from books.
Monacella lives in Groton, which takes part in the state’s One Book, One Town program that encourages townspeople to all read the same book each year. The goal is to increase literacy while giving neighbors a common conversation topic.
She found a kindred spirit in Polly Richter, one of the school’s sixth-grade language arts teachers. An avid naturalist, Richter had all sorts of ideas of how to inspire kids to read—by getting them outdoors. She also saw the value in using nature activities and books as a “hook” to get youth more involved in the world around them.
“Without hesitation I thought of My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighill George,” said Richter, who had worked with the Nature Conservancy in outdoor education before joining the Montville public schools 10 years ago. George is a prolific, award-winning author of nature memoirs and novels for young readers, from There’s an Owl in the Shower, Julie of the Wolves, and Water Sky to sequels in the Mountain series.
“The book is about a boy, Sam Gribley, who runs away from home to live by himself in the woods on old family property,” she said. “He lives in a hollowed-out part of a tree, fishes and hunts, and basically does manage to live. It explains a lot of what happens in nature in the process, and his ingenuity. It did have a lot of appeal to the kids.”
The two came up with a “One Class, One Book” program and garnered a $2,500 Let’s Read grant from the Community Foundation of Southeastern Connecticut to pay for program materials.
The grant made it possible for the school to present each of its 210 incoming sixth-graders with a loaner copy of the book for their independent reading over the summer. In June, Richter and Monacella went to the town’s three elementary schools to present the fifth-graders their books and other summer reading ideas.
“We’re not encouraging running away from home,” laughed Richter. “It’s the idea that you can be self-reliant and that there is a lot more to the world than what’s inside four concrete block walls.”
The grant also made it possible for the children, and their families, to see live birds of prey, up close.
Late last semester, Wind Over Wings, a wildlife rehabilitation and education center based in Clinton, brought a live peregrine falcon, a great horned owl, and a saw-whet owl for students to meet.
This fall, the sixth-graders, their parents, and family members were invited in for a different evening program with Wind Over Wings, this time with a live bald eagle and a turkey vulture, as well as a falcon and owl. Parents and children also built bird feeders in the school cafeteria.
“Some people told us we couldn’t get parents to come to school one night to build a bird feeder,” said Monacella. “But they did.”
It was a simple design, she said, using plastic water bottles. When she decided it wouldn’t be safe to let them use scissors to make holes in the bottle, she improvised and handed out drywall screws.
“At one point, all you could hear was parents and kids sawing holes into their plastic bottles with the screws,” she said. “That was the neatest thing; they were so into building their bird feeders.”
The response from the kids has been pretty amazing, according to Richter. With seven of the 10 classes tallied, more than 130 of the students said they read the book. If this trend holds up, they expect more than half of the sixth-graders will have read it.
“It was awesome. I think it was one of the best books I ever read,” said sixth-grader Ryan Dmowski. “If I had the chance to live like that—not that I don’t like my dad, my mom, my sister, or my cat—if I had the chance to and I could, and the tree was big enough, I’d definitely do it.”
Ryan had already read a couple of other survivor books, including Hatchet and Brian’s Winter, two books by Gary Paulsen about a young boy stranded in the Canadian wilderness after an airplane crash. The boy survives for years, building a lean-to, fishing, and living off the land.
“It was really good,” agreed classmate Mellisa Miller. “I like how Sam found a hollow tree and slept in it and made a chimney so he could have a fire in it.”
Joelle Hage said although her favorite books are about make-believe places, she also enjoyed reading this and other ones about living in the wilderness.
“I read really thick books,” she said. These days she is reading Eragon by Christopher Paolini, a story about a young boy who finds a shiny blue stone that turns out to be a dragon egg. He names his dragon Saphira.
“I usually watch the movies, but I really wanted to read Eragon because everyone else is reading it,” she said. “My brother says the Harry Potter books are better than the movies because they have more details and you can actually hear what the person is thinking.”
In early October, the sixth-graders got outdoors to physically experience the richness of thoughts and ideas described in the novel.
One team performed seaside ecology exercises at Bluff Point State Park in Groton; the other did pond studies at a pond within walking distance of the school. Both groups went to Bushy Hill Nature Center in Ivoryton for hands-on training in making cordage (rope), fire-making using primitive tools, and building debris huts from sticks, grasses, and leaves.
“When we went on the field trips, we could talk about what happened in the book and what we did in actual life,” said Joelle, who thought she would try living in the wild, as long as Mellisa would come along. “It’s pretty cool because you can relate to the book and you’ve actually done the stuff that Sam has done.”
“It’s been fun. We can share our ideas about the book, our likes, and dislikes. I thought it was pretty cool,” Mellisa said.
Making a connection to literacy was a big objective of the grant, Richter said. She recalled how on one tour, she and one of the boys worked hard to ignite a fire with a bow drill.
“‘I feel just like Sam Gridley,’ he told me. Here he was, out in the woods, and thinking about the book,” said Richter. “At that moment, I thought ‘This really succeeded.’”
“The kids have been really excited about the activities,” said Monacella. “We haven’t done a lot yet on discussing the book.”
There definitely are more reading and writing-related activities involving the book and students’ experiences planned for the school year. The teachers will measure readership of this and other related books, as well as compare student CMT scores and performance in the classroom.
For any students who haven’t read their book yet, there’s still time.
“Some friends have read only a couple of pages, or haven’t read it yet,” said Mellisa of her classmates. “I tell them I think it’s a pretty good book and you should actually start reading it again.”
With multiple copies of the book and additional resources added to the school’s library, Richter and Monacella hope the program will be something that can be continued in future years at minimal expense.
“We’ve already figured out how to do all these things. We think the program has been very successful, and we hope to continue it,” Richter said.
Parents also have been given reading lists and ideas for continuing the discussion and theme, Richter said. As a side benefit, families received information about nature activities they can do in the state as part of Connecticut’s No Child Left Inside campaign. This initiative sponsored by the Department of Environmental Protection encourages families to get their kids outdoors and reconnected with nature.
For more information, visit www.windoverwings.com and www.nochildleftinside.org.