By Nicole Wetzel, GCC elementary after-school Silver Room teacher

The literacy journey of the children and teachers in the elementary after-school Gold House classroom began in 2023. That fall, we built a practice of reading a picture book every day, and by December the children, in second through fifth grades, were begging to read a chapter book.

By January 2024, we were continuing to read every day and began reading “The Wild Robot” by Peter Brown. This book, suggested by one of the children, had short chapters with illustrations and was a New York Times bestseller, all of which made this the perfect book for us.

We set a timer and read for 15 minutes every single day. Soon there was a student who read alongside the teacher, giving voice to the wild robot Roz and encouraging other children, many of whom were emerging readers, to read a paragraph or two. Goodman Community Center’s literacy specialist, Iris Patterson, acquired copies for her Literacy Club children so that they could keep up with the story too.

We were very excited to learn of an animated movie release of “The Wild Robot” and made plans to see our beloved Roz, her adopted son Brightbill and the beautiful community they forged in the Wild (an island where the story takes place and is inhabited only by animals). We invited family and friends to a showing in October. Everyone received a bookmark and a handout on the benefits of reading aloud to older children. After the movie, we talked about what we remembered, made comparisons and shared all of the points in the movie that made us cry.

Seeing the movie was a celebration of finishing our first chapter book together, but that was not the end of the journey. Gold House finished six chapter books this year from January until August, and many of those children are now listening to their seventh book in the Silver House, which this year has third graders. All it took was 15 minutes, every day!

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