My Kindergarten neighbor asked for assistance in motivating one of her students who just wouldn’t do any of the work she assigned to him. So she asked if I would observe him. I agreed, but I wanted to have him come to my room with work and let me observe him in my setting without distractions.
We worked on identifying items which started with the letter W – “worm” was one of the first pictures. My opening line was, “Do you eat worms?”
He looked at me like I was asking the dumbest question in the world. “No, “ he said. Then thinking, “unless they are gummy worms. I do eat them,” he concluded.
So he then immediately jumped from worms, to swordfish and pirates. I don’t understand the synapse link, but then he is in kindergarten and the mind works very fast. We talk for awhile about swordfish and pirates. How the pirates would take the swords off the swordfish and use them. Even removing their eyeballs from the fish and using the socket to put their thumbs to hold onto the swords when they were fighting. He went into great details.
At this point I now knew what we needed to do to help him with his work. He had no desire to work unless he had a motivator and pirates would be his motivator.
I told him that I had would look up a video on pirates if he would complete the work his teacher had left with us. Faster than, “shiver me timbers” his was working on the “W” sounds and had completed (with accuracy) all of the work and his hand was flagging me down as I moved from student to student. He didn’t shout he just waved. I checked his work and gave him a “high in the sky” hand slap (high fives can be confusing during math, so we use the other phrase.) We then moved to another table, I pulled out my iPad and found a movie trailer from Pirates of the Caribbean and we watched it together. He was mesmerized.
Not to lose the moment, we went back over to his regular classroom and he showed me the other work he needed to do. It was a lot, but I told him that if he would work and get it all done, correctly, I would read him a book that I had about Pirates and searching for gold (actually, A Pirates ABC’s). He did.
I checked the work, he did great. We came back to my classroom, we read with others in my class, but he got to point out items in the pictures about the pirates, the pirate ship and to call out the letters the crew and found on the island and in the ocean. Then we were done. He needed to have a continual motivator. He had only read the book once and wanted to read it again.
I said, “how about we take the book back to your classroom. Give it to your teacher, and when you have done your work and awaken from your nap, you can read it again, all by yourself. He agreed. We did.
At the end of the day I visited to see how he had done. Teacher said he was a different child. He finished his work with fewer prompts the rest of the day and at the end of the day he had earned the reward to look at the book alone. Before leaving, he placed the book on the teacher’s desk and stated, “I will want to read it again.” To which she stated, “as long as you continue to do your work, then you can read it again, and again.”
I will check on him in the morning and make sure that he remembers.
Our favorite letter in the whole book? “Rrrrr,” of course.
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Using an empty tissue box, some craft sticks and blank paper cut into the shape of hands, the story cube can be twirled and then a hand is selected (for one-on-one work) or the story cube can be passed along the small group to choose a hand to answer comprehension questions. The story cube can also be great for whole class setting as each hand is pulled from the cube, another stick can be pulled for the student that will be chosen to answer the question.