"Ipad?" "No, book!"

For every chapter the students do in their text book they have a short reading exam that goes along with it. Miss Abeer, the teacher I work with for 1st-3rd grade, calls them up one by one to read the passage to her. To keep them quiet during this, and to help them practice their vocabulary, she has the students copy their vocabulary words and definitions multiple times. This equates to me being pretty bored, because the low vision students I work with don't need me to do anything.

In order to fight the boredom, I brought my Kindle into the second grade class with me and read. All the kids wanted to know what it was. I didn't know how to explain "e-book" so I just told them "book." They asked, "phone?" (no), "Ipad?" (no). And they wanted to see if it was touch so a bunch of them tried to make the screen move. It's not a touch screen so it didn't actually do anything. They figured out there were buttons to make it do things though, at which point I had to stop them before I completely lost my place in the book.

Eventually, one of the boys decided that it really is just a book, so he asked to read it with me. I figured the one I was reading was too hard for him, so I pulled up a book of fairy tales, enlarged the font, and sat with him so he could read it. As he read a group of his classmates formed a circle around us to listen. I don't know if they understood much of it, but they all seemed to enjoy reading together.

Reading with one of the low vision 1st Graders