The children had a marvellous resource for reading practice in The School Magazine, published each month by the Education Department in upper and lower primary versions. That journal was already venerable, recognised for its quality and worth in world publishing. Topical, factual articles were accompanied by stories, poems and plays, often composed by well-known, established authors of the time. My pupils loved it; they looked forward to the new copy each month, read it voraciously, and returned to their favourite stories and articles many times over.
Each child had a stiff cardboard folder in which to store their magazines. Loops of string, threaded between the pages, retained all the magazines in the holder over the year. The children would keep these folders always nearby and in every spare moment ferret out their favourites and get busy re-reading.
Prior to distributing each magazine to the children, I made flashcards for those words I knew would be new and maybe problematic. I was ready to assist the kids in gaining greatest enjoyment when they pounced on their copy.
Through the magazines my students increased their word recognition; practised comprehension and reading for meaning; performed the plays; recited the poems as a choral group or as solo performers; solved puzzles—and just enjoyed themselves. Hours of active learning accompanied every edition, and I wrote to let the editor know how much receiving the magazine meant to these isolated pupils.
Apart from the magazine we had little reading material to begin with. Overall the kids enjoyed reading, but I was never convinced they were able to do enough. As their homes lacked electricity, it was hard for them to read at night. I had no expectation that they could, would or should read at home, just as I had no expectation that they would do homework. Most reading for pleasure had to take place at school, so I tried to make space for it. The kids knew that their completion of any tasks ahead of time could be supplemented by some independent reading. As most had no models of reading at home, I wanted to reinforce the usefulness and joy they could obtain from books and other publications. By my gradual building up of the stock of books for reading pleasure, the children were introduced to a range of authors and tales they came to love.
The young ones had departmental readers featuring the characters David, Sue and Wendy, so we worked our way through those. The first of them, Let’s Read, introduced our youngest pair to reading and had twenty or so words to be learnt by sight. Jimmy could read the entire book by the second day; Charlie, though, took some months to gain faltering mastery over the words. Seaside Story followed, which, as the title suggests, contained content totally unfamiliar to the kids; neither had seen the sea, let alone built castles on the golden sands. Open Road to Reading, the third instalment, was based around a family with a father who set off each day to the office in his suit, tie and snappy hat, with his briefcase. It took much explaining to Charlie and Jimmy for them to begin to gain any understanding of such a lifestyle.
Rather than leaving the young ones to flounder with stories for which they lacked any context, we decided once more to write our own. Producing the simple ‘up’ and ‘down’ stories had excited Charlie and Jimmy.
Finding content was easy: each Monday morning the kids reported news items that provided lots of ideas for exciting material. Memorable was a discussion of the word ‘slithering’, which the children had suggested we use in the written-down story of Lindie’s snake-in-a-pantry thriller. Susie said she loved the word and enjoyed another one in the story: ‘hissing’.
When asked to explain, Carol gradually got out, ‘Each word sounds like it should, and each has a pattern that looks like it should.’
It was Rick—one of the village boys, all close observers of nature—who said, ‘“Slithering” is a long, low word, except it has three curves where the snake is coiling.’
And it was quick-witted Susie, again, who said, ‘“Hissing” is also a long, low word, with the fangs out to begin and end, but you have to be a snake to say the word.’
‘Yes,’ cried all the others as they hiiisssssed and hiiiissssed.
Some words are onomatopoeic, and the children grasped that concept easily enough that day. No child ever stumbled over ‘slithering’ or ‘hissing’ when the word occurred in later reading.
Gradually, by documenting such stories, we accumulated a stock of readers better suited to the kids. All loved the books they had jointly written and engaged wholeheartedly in contributing the illustrations.
Tom and Jack recounted a lengthy tale of a camping trip they had undertaken on horseback one weekend. They’d left Tom’s homestead on the Saturday morning and ridden for five hours due west through wild, uncharted, heavily timbered country. The boys had known that if they kept westward they would eventually reach Duffys Creek and find, on its downstream banks, an isolated shearing shed where they could shelter for the night. Both asserted their confidence they wouldn’t lose their way. The other kids, their listeners, were convinced of this too; the two older boys were models for proper male behaviour in the eyes of all.
Tom and Jack’s riding and camping story reminded us of the distinctly Australian anxiety about children being lost in the bush. Early in February, just after I’d commenced at the school, the children had chattered about a little boy who had been lost outside the town of Guyra, also in New England and not that far as the crow flies from our school. The search for the child kept the kids talking for many days, and we all cheered when news came of him being found and rescued. A little later the children started singing a song about the boy, one they’d heard on the radio; after reaching number one on the local station’s hit parade, it became as well known as the lost boy himself.
Jack and Tom told us they had, indeed, lost their direction once during their camping trip, but felt no real concern. Both were confident of their bushman skills, and they’d reoriented themselves after breaking clear of some heavy scrub and sighting the Sugarloaf, a mountain south-west of the village.
We all worked together to write out a version of this story, which was titled by agreement ‘Two Mates’, and Tom produced a marvellous set of pen-and-ink sketches to illustrate the important elements from his and Jack’s point of view. All the children loved to read this story, whether in Grade One or Five, the littlies being helped to read by the older students.
Young Charlie offered his own story one Monday. I held my breath, hoping for a triumph but ready to offer assistance if necessary. The episode was most memorable, as Charlie was unusually assertive. This was his breakthrough performance. His brothers attempted to prompt him as he spoke, but he was having none of it. Haltingly, but with a positive trajectory despite his shyness, he delivered his tale.
‘Last Saturday my dad got lots of old metal bits together. He had rusty bits of barbed wire and he had broken bits of corrugated iron and he had old tins with holes and that, and he threw these in our ute and then he got me, Phil and Mike in the ute and then he drove down the Limbri Road a bit and then he took a track off into the bush and then he stopped when we came to an old mine.’
At about this point Mike, Charlie’s older brother, tried to intervene to tell us all which mine and where the shaft was located. But Charlie wouldn’t accept being overtaken. He said, very firmly, ‘I’m telling this news.’ He went on, ‘Dad wouldn’t let me get out but I could see Dad and Phil and Mike take the old stuff off the back and throw it bit by bit down the mine hole, but I was frightened that Dad or them might fall down the hole and I was happy when the job was done and I was happy that I had worked with Dad and I was happy we had got the job done really well and I felt real good. Dad said he was pleased with me and me brothers.’
Charlie helped develop this story into a written and illustrated booklet, contributing some colourful pictures. He included, with prompts from the other children, that the Highland Mary, where the rubbish had been tipped, was the long-disused shaft of the biggest, richest-producing and last-closed of the district’s goldmines.
Charlie learnt quickly to sight-read the story and even enjoyed reading it aloud to the others. They loved to hear him, gave great encouragement each time and heaped praise when he had it fully read. He glowed when he was the centre of attention.
Until that day, Charlie’s shoebox had contained only about sixty sight words; after, he added new words nearly every day until he needed an extra box. Soon he had a collection of many hundreds of sight words and was on his way to being an independent reader. Having long doubted that outcome, I took immense pleasure in Charlie’s success.
From Vickie, Mark and Carol Thomas, whose home was secreted in the bush on the opposite bank of the creek, we heard an appealing story. The three of them batted the narrative back and forth.
Vickie commenced, so very quietly we all strained to hear. ‘We have a new rooster. I didn’t like him at first. When I went into the yard he used to fly at me. I was afraid of his spurs. I thought he could hurt me.’
Mark continued, ‘He’s a big, red fellow. We call him Rusty. He’s only young. Dad said, “Don’t you worry about him,” but we were afraid.’
Carol chimed in, ‘Even Mum wouldn’t go near him. When we had to get the eggs, she stood near us. She wouldn’t let Rusty come close to us.’
And so the story grew.
‘Dad told us Rusty was just doing what he had to do. Dad said Rusty thought he was the boss. He was keeping the chooks safe. Dad said Rusty would learn we wouldn’t harm any of the fowls. Then he’d stop going for us.’
‘So we kept the best veggie scraps for Rusty. We gave them to him when the other chooks were already locked up for the night.’
‘Rusty loved the green scraps. He’d gobble them all up. He comes when we call him now—he knows us.’
‘Now we love Rusty. He even sits on our lap for a petting sometimes.’
‘All the chooks have names and they know their pet name. Rusty always comes if we call, “Rusty, Rusty.”’
‘Dad says Rusty is the best rooster we’ve ever had. Mum likes him now. She says Rusty is a brave, strong rooster.’
What a delight it was for the kids to write up and illustrate that story. The schoolroom walls were decorated with wonderful drawings and paintings of scarlet and ruby-red birds with huge feathers, breast-deep in emerald-tinted vegie scraps, for more than a week. Some of the depictions brilliantly caught the rooster’s evil-looking yellow eye.