Second-Graders Are Not Idioms

"Why do they want us to read our hearts out, Mr. Haworth," one of my second-graders asked me today. She was looking at the Book-It! sign on the back of the classroom door.

As part of my job at my elementary school, I help out with guided reading in both first and second grades. And occasionally kindergarten, but I digress. Sometimes it's interesting and fun since some of my second-graders were my first-graders from last year.

I seized the moment and decided to take the opportunity to expand their horizons a little. I wrote the word 'idiom' on a small dry erase board.

"Who can tell me what this word is," I asked them.

"That's not nice, Mr. Haworth," Miley, as I'll call her, said. She looked at the word wide-eyed and said, "I'm not!"

"The word is idiom," I said, then pronounced it again more slowly. "Ih-dee-uhm. Idiom. An idiom is something we say that can't really be true. Like this morning. Does everyone remember? It was raining cats and dogs earlier. But were cats and dogs really falling from the sky?"

They giggled and agreed that, no, cats and dogs did not fall from the sky.

"What if they did," asked J.J. (not his real name!). I refused to get sucked into that one.

"Now, what does the poster say," I asked, ignoring the question. "Very good! It says 'Read your heart out.' How much do they want us to read?"

The general consensus with my little group of four was "a lot."

"Now, is your heart going to pop out if you read too much," I asked. I received two no's and two yesses. Before I could continue, J.J. chimed in.

"What would happen if it really did pop out," he said. "It would start bouncing all around the floor in here. Then out the door. Then..."

"Open your books," I said quickly, passing out the readers we were working on.

Those second-graders may not be idioms, but their guided reading teacher? Well, he's questionable...