Student Success Stories From Parents

Brennan Cruse's Story by Haley Cruse

Reading Recovery has changed my life forever!

I am an elementary school teacher with 15 years experience. I have always been passionate about kids learning to read and have always done my best to implement the latest and greatest in my classroom.

On the home front, I also recognize the importance of children being exposed to good literature right from birth and made a point of always reading to my children every night. Naturally, I assumed that their experience of learning to read would be quite simple since they had a rich language environment since birth. So when my 6-year-old son began to fall behind in Grade 1, I was terrified, wondering what went wrong.

But life changed overnight when he made it into Reading Recovery! (To make it in, he had to be the most-at-risk Grade 1 reader.) Suddenly he went from little or no interest in learning to read, to a child who couldn’t stop reading, and he was excited to share his new ability with everyone around him. His self-esteem was bursting!

When I went in to see a Reading Recovery lesson, I knew that my career path was now going to be dramatically changed as well. I HAD TO become a Reading Recovery teacher. That was 3 years ago, and now I am passionate about Reading Recovery. I have learned so much and love guiding the most at-risk learners on their journey of learning how to read.

Reading Recovery really works. With Reading Recovery, the achievement gap is being dramatically reduced. Reading Recovery should be available to every Grade 1 student who struggles to learn to read.

My son Brennan wrote this letter when he completed Grade 4:

Letter from Brennan Cruse, Grade 4 – Ontario, Canada

Learning to read is something that most of us take for granted, but in many places in the world kids never get the chance that we do. But at Pope John Paul II School, ALL kids get to learn how to read.

For some kids, learning to read is really easy. Maybe their parents already taught them before they came to school. Again, for some this came easy. And for others of us, this was harder. That’s where Reading Recovery comes in.

When I was littler, my Mom read to me every night. In fact, she still reads to me often. I remember asking her for another and another story and never wanting to go to sleep because I just loved being read to. And then I came to school and one of my favourite parts of the day in kindergarten was when the teacher read us a story.

But in Grade 1, I was mortified when the teacher told me that now I had to learn how to read. I had NO interest in learning to read – my Mom was still reading me bedtime stories, and I really saw no reason why I had to learn to read. But the teacher persisted (and I resisted!) and I soon found myself falling behind in Grade 1.

My mom flipped into panic mode! She started calling all over the place – she wanted to put me in some kind of tutoring program like Sylvan or something like that. But then, Mrs. Brooks stepped in and said, “Wait, he’s going to make it into Reading Recovery!” I had no idea what Reading Recovery was at the time (now I know so much about it I could probably teach it, but that’s a story for another day) anyway, all I know is the news that I was getting in sure calmed my Mom down.

I soon discovered that being in Reading Recovery meant I got to be one of those lucky kids that got out of class for a ˝ hour each day to go and read with the reading teacher. Already it was sounding pretty good.

And I soon learned that Reading Recovery was actually a lot of fun. At first I resisted of course because, like I said, I had no interest in learning how to read. But then I realized that Mrs. Brooks was not going to settle for that. She continued to insist on me learning. So when I finally decided to join in and help her out, I quickly learned to read in just 13 weeks. By the end of Grade 1, I was reading at the same level as all the rest of the kids in my class, and had finally learned that reading to myself could actually be a lot of fun.

I can’t even begin to imagine what it would be like if I hadn’t had the chance to learn to read back in Grade 1. Now I LOVE to read. I love to read Goosebumps novels and books about animals, especially cats. I love to go on the Internet and search for coins on ebay for my coin collection. I love to read magazines. And one of my favourite things to do is talk to my friends on MSN.

And one more thing about learning how to read – when I was in Reading Recovery my mom came in to see a lesson and loved it so much that she decided to become a Reading Recovery teacher, too. I feel really proud that she loves her job so much and a lot of that is because of me.

READING ROCKS!



Photo: Brennan in 2008