Ms. Yearby grabs a seat at a desk in a spare bedroom inside her apartment, props herself up in front of a Macbook computer and logs onto Facebook.
It’s time for another night of her reading adventures.
Over the next half hour, Keisha Yearby will work through Tom Percival’s “Perfectly Norman,” a children’s book about a young boy who grows wings and struggles with the prospect of being different from the rest of his peers.
Yearby, a second grade teacher at B.M. Williams Primary in Chesapeake, has led these reading sessions once a week since March. The additional reading time will boost her students’ comprehension skills, she says.
Plus, she likes to give motivational messages and asks them to answer questions throughout the broadcast.
Source: The Virginian Pilot
“How does Norman look about growing his wings? Look at his face,” Yearby said Tuesday night, holding an illustration up close to the camera as she streams on Facebook Live, a social media platform where users can watch and comment in real time. “Give me a word to describe how he looks.”
The answers start pouring in: Confused. Afraid. Sad. Baffled. Yearby liked that last one.
Her viewers — many of them elementary age students, many in her own class — are getting at the theme of the night.
“Everybody has something in them that is great,” Yearby says. “All of us are different.”
Each of her videos gets around 20 live viewers who comment more than 200 times.
For some families, these Tuesday night reading sessions have become a regular part of the week, even for students who have moved on from her class.
“It’s a staple of our schedule now,” said Monique Womack, whose 8-year-old daughter Zoe continues to watch even through she moved on from B.M. Williams to Crestwood Intermediate. B.M. Williams only goes up to the second grade.
Zoe watches the videos on her mom’s cellphone at home where she can quickly type in answers to the many questions Yearby asks while reading the story. Zoe was even able to watch and read along during the summer months when Yearby continued her videos.
“I think she’s probably the most personable person ever,” Womack said. “Even through a computer screen she can interact with them and teach them at the same time.”
Originally from Chicago’s South Side, Yearby, 40, grew up with a mom who was a career public school teacher. From a young age, Yearby remembers having “play daughters,” or younger kids at school, ballet or church she’d help out with with things like jumping rope.
She would go on to college in Kentucky thinking she’d become a veterinarian but, by her junior year, switched to elementary education.
After graduation, she got her master’s in reading and literacy through Walden University online.
As an elementary teacher, Yearby has to teach multiple subjects. But she says she gets most passionate about reading and loves bringing books to life.
One day she came across a post online about a principal at a school in Texas who used Facebook to ensure students had a bedtime story at night.
She got inspired to do the same thing. But she wanted to put her own spin on it.
Source: The Virginian Pilot
Yearby asks her viewers — most of whom log on through their parents’ Facebook accounts — comprehensive questions like having them predict what will happen next in the book. For those who don’t have access to Facebook, Yearby has been uploading her videos to YouTube.
She covers up parts of the text so kids aren’t reading ahead, asking them to think about what the illustrations indicate or what previously happened might tell them about the direction the story is headed.
At the end of her broadcasts, she likes to focus on positive messages. She often sings from the India.Arie song “Just do you.”
On Tuesday night, viewers saw how the boy Norman took off a coat that was hiding his wings. The boy starts to fly, hitting home the message that there was no such thing as perfect.
Yearby told her viewers they each had something special and that they didn’t have to hide it.
“It’s something you were given so share it with the rest of us,” she said.
She told the Pilot: “You can have a 4.0 but if you don’t realize how powerful you are, you’re not going to meet your potential.”
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