Watching Books

Having a copy of a book in their hands while listening and watching its being read was amazing for my English Learners. They would look at their book and then at the screen, comparing the story and illustrations. It was a great teaching tool!

Many read-alouds can be found on YouTube, which is what I typically used. Here is The Very Hungry Caterpillar read by Eric Carle himself. (Since my ELs thought of him as a rock star, they were thrilled to watch it!)

In this video, Bill Martin reads Brown Bear, Brown Bear.

Search for your favorites, and let your students or your own children enjoy and read along!

P.S. If your kiddos LOVE Eric Carle's books as my English Learners did (and my grands do) you can watch this animated version of five of his most popular books on Netflix through the end of June 2016. It includes Papa, Please Get the Moon for Me, The Very Quiet Cricket, The Mixed-Up Chameleon, and I See a Song. (To be honest, $4.99 from Amazon would be a good investment, too!)

The Kids Should DEFINITELY See This!

On this beautiful Good Friday in Tennessee, I have to share an amazing website that I just came across.

I just watched Newton's Three Laws of Motion (always close to this former Physics teacher's heart) and loved it.

TKSST was started in 2011, by Rion Nakaya, who curates it with the help of her own two children. She says, "There’s just so much science, nature, music, art, technology, storytelling and assorted good stuff out there that my kids (and maybe your kids) haven’t seen. It’s most likely not stuff that was made for them…But we don’t underestimate kids around here." That's my favorite! I always felt the textbooks I was provided tended to do that, and I would give my students much more detail and background so they could see the big picture. I think it made a difference.

The 2400+ videos shared on the site include science, technology, space, animals, nature, food, DIY, music, art, and animation. What a treasure trove!

Parents, as well as teachers, will find SO much to love about this collection. Here's a video about making the gorgeous Pysanky Easter eggs.

Of course, before or after watching the video, you need to read your kiddos Patricia Polacco's Rechenka's Eggs! This beautiful book was always a favorite of my ESL students, and we would let them draw designs on plastic eggs after reading it. We also made bookmarks and did activities found on Polacco's book page.

Enjoy The Kid Should See This, and please let me know what your favorite videos are!

Nerdy Book Club: Using Picture Books to Introduce New Units

If you don't follow Nerdy Book Club, you should. You'll find more than 70 bloggers there, so you'll be able to hop right over to their blogs to see which of them will be invaluable to you!

The post I'm featuring today is Top Ten Picture Books To Introduce Units Of Study, by Kari Allen. In it, Kari describes how she used ten favorite books to introduce math, science, and other units to her second graders. Here's an example:

 

Library Mouse written and illustrated by Daniel Kirk

She says, "...it was the foundation for our writing (which we did in all subjects.) I started the year off by sharing this book with students." The next day "students would discover tons of stapled blank books that the Library Mouse left," and thus began their "yearlong (hopefully lifelong) inquiry into writing."

I've long believed, that with the emphasis on reading and math that new standards have required, science and social studies could best be taught by using integrated units. How better to do this than to use books and stories to teach both reading and content?

Enjoy Kari's ideas, and may they lead to many more of your own!

Asperger Experts

I am SO excited to share this with you today! I've known, taught, and observed people with Asperger's Syndrome since I was in elementary school (though I didn't know it at the time.) Most people I know in the education field, especially parents and teachers who love someone with AS, are constantly searching for better ways to help that person be successful. 

Danny Raede and Hayden Mears, both of whom have AS, have developed a Facebook page, a blog, a coaching/mentoring program, reasonably priced video products, and a website, where there are links to 47 video clips posted on their YouTube channel that you can access for FREE!

Here's an example: 

Amazing, right? And who is better equipped to teach us about Asperger's Syndrome than real people who have it?

Many thanks to Erica Falvey, who shared this site to the FB group Encouraging Teachers. I'm SO glad to know about it and to share with you, and I hope you'll help spread the word to your friends and colleagues.

For more information about Asperger's Syndrome and other autism spectrum disorders, go to the wonderful Autism Speaks website.  

Picture Books for Science AND Readworks.org

I'm on the deck this morning with four, yes FOUR, grandbabies 4-years-old and under. They've been having a fine bubbles party, which of course leads this retired (or "expired," as one little friend put it) science teacher to think about science.

I've also been on Pinterest, where I found a link to a great blog post from Erica, over at What Do We Do All Day. You NEED to go:

I love books, and reading, and science -- and I believe in combining them as much as possible. With the emphasis in CCSS on nonfiction, teachers have a wonderful opportunity to teach reading and science as a two-for-one! 

I'm also a fan of Readworks, which provides more than 1,000 leveled literary & nonfiction passages with questions, as well as comprehension & novel units, and skill & strategy units. You simply can't go wrong there.

Erica recommends The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, by William Kamkwamba & Bryan Mealer. Cross-reference with Readworks, and you find a complete 3rd grade unit to use with that book! It includes a detailed lesson plan in three parts:

1. Teacher Modeling and Questioning
2. Guided Practice and Discussion (with a graphic organizer)
3. Student Independent Practice 

If you are new at teaching close reading, this is for you. If you aren't new, well, here's a lesson you don't have to create! As always, you should make it your own by tweaking any part of it.

Be sure to look at all the books in Erica's list, and while you're looking at the Readworks links, check out what else is available there, for FREE. Just register, and everything on the site is yours. Enjoy!

Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol

The official SIOP website says that the "Sheltered Instruction Observation Protocol (SIOP) Model is a research-based and validated instructional model that has proven effective in addressing the academic needs of English learners..." but I learned while an ESL teacher that what worked for English Learners also worked for native English speakers.

Implementing the full SIOP Model is a big task that requires training and professional development. I'm suggesting that you look the website over, and try some of the lesson plans and activities provided FREE. Even if you don't have English Learners in your class, you most likely have students who can benefit from the Comprehensible Input, Strategies, Interaction, and Lesson Delivery, as well as the Review & Assessment included in the model.

The lessons shared range from early childhood to Adult/GED, and as you look through them, you will see that careful planning and scaffolding are two of the most important features. The same, of course, is true of any lesson, for every level of students in every content area!

I think you'll enjoy looking these lesson ideas over to see what you can use. You can read more about the protocol and find answers to questions about it here. 

Nelson Mandela 1918 - 2013

The world has lost a great warrior in the quest for freedom and justice. Please don't let this moment go by without engaging your students in reading, researching, discussing, and writing about "Madiba" - Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela.

I linked to the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory in a post last July about the book Nelson Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom. Today I'm adding resources that offer retrospectives on his life and work, some of which include lesson plans.

A lesson plan from PBS: Remembering Nelson Mandela

From the New York Times: The Life and Legacy of Nelson Mandela: 1918-2013, a collection of resources that includes

• an illustrated timeline of his life
• a slide show
• images of the anti-apartheid struggle in posters from 1967 - 1994
• memories of Mandela
• his major speeches
• his obituary
• reactions from public figures and NY Times readers

Freedom Fighters, a lesson plan comparing the work of Nelson Mandela and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Readworks Revisited

I've written before about the amazing ReadWorks.org website, and I have to share today that they've just added 100 new passages. As you can see above, these include fiction and original reporting, in addition to science and social studies. The passages are identified by grade level and lexile. 

This fabulous site also provides Skill and Strategy Units, Novel Units, and so much more! I could go on and on, but I'd prefer that you check it out for yourself. I guarantee that you will find it hard to believe that all of this is FREE!

Common Core Poetry Exemplars

I have good news from the Poetry Foundation! This great group has collected almost 50 of the poems that are listed in Appendix B of the CCSS, and they are available to you FREE. Links to the poems are found in the October 28 article Common Core State Standards Text Exemplars on the foundation's website. And while you're there, be sure to check out some of the MANY other resources available. 

Let's say you decide to read Carl Sandburg's "Fog" with your 4th grade class. By clicking the Related Content tab above the poem, you'll find

• a biography of the poet
• links to 34 of his other poems
• links to 15 audio and podcasts of his poetry
• two archival recordings of Sandburg, from the mid 1900s

 And that's just one of the poems on this website. Hustle on over and start finding great resources you can use with your own kiddos!

Update: Last August I wrote about the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction's webpage that listed free, online sources for the CCSS text exemplars that are public domain. Unfortunately, that document has been taken down, so I deleted the post from the blog. I hope this one helps with your poetry lessons!

Foldables FoldiFun Factory, by blogger Mor Zrihen

A quick heads-up to all of you who use and love foldables (and those of you who soon will!) Mor Zrihen, a teacher in south Florida, blogs over at A Teacher's Treasure. She shares her own collection at the Foldables FoldiFun Factory tab on her blog. 

Giving credit to Dinah Zike, who holds the registered trademark for foldables, Mor describes them as "interactive 3D graphic organizers (that) encourage student ownership of study material, provide a kinesthetic component to teaching strategies, and promote long-term retention of academic lessons." 

Below are just a few pics of Mor's cool ideas:

Math

ELA

Vocabulary

Click on over and see what you can use, offered FREE from this great blogger!

Common Core Writing? Help is Here!

A truly amazing Common Core resource was just released this summer! 

Achieve the Core now offers on its website a FREE book - the 686 page In Common: Effective Writing for All Students Collection of All Student Work Samples, K-12, by The Vermont Writing Collaborative, with Student Achievement Partners and CCSSO. It is a PDF document that you can download and print. Before you think, "PRINT 686 pages?!" remember that no one will need to print the entire document. Instead, you can pick and choose the parts that you need, and print them as you need them.

If you teach ELA, I believe you'll find it invaluable. Check out the Table of Contents:

Dr. Jim Patterson, a lead writer of the ELA/Literacy Common Core State Standards, says that while CCSS Appendix C "sought to illustrate by example what it meant to say that a given piece of writing met the Standards, the included works had not been written expressly to the Standards. In Common advances the work begun in Appendix C."

Joanna Hawkins and Diana Leddy led the effort to complete this project and make it available to teachers across the nation. Patterson explains its value in several ways:

• It has more than twice as many samples as Appendix C, all "planned, drafted, revised, edited, and published by students working over extended periods of time."
• It is the result of "an intriguing real-world 'experiment' in on-demand writing."
• The writers "crafted grade-specific argument, informative/explanatory, and narrative writing prompts...based on source texts and intended to elicit student samples written to nearly uniform tasks across broad grade bands." 
• The result is "a stepwise progression of ever-more-sophisticated writing samples with a common baseline."

The switch to the CCSS is huge by anyone's standards, and resources like this one should help to make the transition easier for everyone who teaches writing. I hope it helps you!

Booklists for the Common Core from Reading Rockets

Almost a year ago, I wrote about the many resources available from Reading Rockets, the national multimedia literacy initiative of WETA's Learning Media. 

With the current transition to Common Core State Standards, one of the most useful resources for those of you who teach K-4 is their Themed Booklists. As you create your CCSS ELA units, you will be searching for stories and informational text that you can sequence appropriately for your kiddos. 

And while your reading textbooks will provide a starting point, you will need to search out other quality texts, a daunting task to accomplish on your own! The 150+ booklists found on the Reading Rockets site can help. Below is just a sampling of booklists you'll find there.

• Are You Ready? School's Open
• Books About Our National Parks
• For Laughing Out Loud
• How Things Work
• Jobs People Have
• Passport to the World
• Remarkable Women
• Young Detectives

Every list I previewed consisted of ten books, with a nice mix of fiction and informational text. Check it out - just another awesome FREE resource from this great site. And while you're there look at what else Reading Rockets offers! 

Listen and Read: Read-Along Books from Scholastic

I love Scholastic for many reasons; the newest is their Listen and Read site, where they provide 54 FREE nonfiction read-along ebooks for primary students. Your kiddos can access them on a computer or tablet, or you can use them with a group on an interactive whiteboard. They are sorted by subject and by level, with a good mix of science and social studies topics.

So why is it called Listen and Read? Because each of the ebooks is also an audiobook - by clicking on a "listen" button, your beginning reader can hear the words on the screen as she reads along. A nice feature at the end of each story is a list of vocabulary words.

Here's a sample page from a story for 2nd graders:

I learned about this great resource via a Facebook post by Charity Preston, who writes the Organized Classroom blog. Charity's post linked to a Pinterest pin by Carolyn Wilhelm, who operates the Wise Owl Factory. Both of these sites offer a ton of free resources themselves, and are definitely worthy of a visit.

Enjoy, and have a great weekend!

Roll ~ Say ~ Keep Games

So yesterday, at the school where I work as an Academic Specialist, I got yet another great idea FROM one of the teachers. She had been to a PD session and came back talking about something she heard there. A quick Google, and one thing led to another. Yep, another teacher theft moment! :)

I'm so thankful that great teachers share their ideas with the rest of us, and I'm especially thankful today for Kathy Gursky and her website, The School Bell. 

Kathy puts me in mind of the awesome Cherry Carl because her site is packed with so many good ideas for activities, graphics, games, and projects. I want to show you just one piece of her "Dolch Kit."

If you teach primary students, you know that a huge key to fluent reading is knowing sight words well. Kathy has downloadable sets of flash cards, phrase cards, and mini-flashcards that are perfect for playing "Roll ~ Say ~ Keep!"

I downloaded all 11 sets of Kathy's mini word cards and adapted the game board slightly. You can download my board below. I printed, mounted on construction paper, and laminated. Our 1st grade teacher and SPED teacher are all set to let their students play a new game practice essential sight words...shhh! ;-)

An Excellent Find: E is for Explore!

You are going to LOVE the site I have to share with you tonight! I came across it via a science activity posted to Pinterest, and was I ever amazed and delighted when I followed the link to Erin Bittman's blog, E is for Explore!

Erin blends graphic design, her original career, with her current path toward becoming a teacher, to "develop unique learning activities, search the internet and compile additional great ideas from other sources." Her site is chock-full of manipulatives and activities useful across the curriculum, from literacy to math and engineering, and she provides easy links to sites that she shares.

Since Easter is coming soon, I'll show you images from one of Erin's posts, wherein she shares activities from inferencing to fractions using Plastic Eggs: 

Great, huh? Click on over to Erin's blog, where "all 'E is for Explore' activities conform to state common core curriculum standards."

And you're welcome! :-)

Why Inquiry? RAD

I met Dr. Judy Willis a few years ago, when she presented her RAD ideas to science teachers and professional developers at Middle Tennessee State University. In order to share her research at later PD sessions, I summarized it, and I want to share the handout that accompanied my sessions with you. (It was sent to her for approval first.)

Her story is unique: "Dr. Judy Willis, a board-certified neurologist in Santa Barbara, California, has combined her 15 years as a practicing adult and child neurologist with her teacher education training and years of classroom experience. After five years teaching at Santa Barbara Middle School, and ten years of classroom teaching all together, in 2010, Dr. Willis reluctantly left teaching middle school students and dedicated herself full-time to teaching educators."

Why Inquiry? 

All children are born scientists who learn about the world around them through exploration and discovery. 

Inquiry learning is twice as efficient as “drill and kill.” It builds content knowledge, understanding, and reasoning. 

• It increases students’ engagement so they develop knowledge conceptually 
• Students construct understanding through investigations rather than by rote memory. 
• Students develop reasoning skills that enable them to handle open-ended tasks, to think creatively, and to make decisions rationally. 

Even when students are rigorously taught the facts, they don’t necessarily develop the reasoning skills they need to succeed.

I. Lessons should be organized to engage students’ brains in order for them to acquire content knowledge. 

Our planning should revolve around this question: “How can my students use inquiry to acquire knowledge and develop understanding so that knowledge can be applied to other areas of their learning and their lives?” 

During inquiry activities, YOU facilitate as YOUR STUDENTS make meaning for themselves; you may need to provide direct instruction at multiple points during an inquiry-based unit.

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The goal of our teaching is that acquired information gets to the conscious, cognitive brain so that new learning reaches long-term memory and becomes useable, transferable knowledge.

To reach the “conscious brain,” sensory input must be Reticular Activating System “selected.” The reactive brain responds to stimuli with fight/flight/freeze.

We must get past that filter with stability and familiarity, and then captivate R.A.S. attention/stimulate curiosity with

• Change, novelty, surprise 
• Prior knowledge activation 
• Advertising 
• Color, costumes 
• Music, movement 
• Discrepant events 

Some ideas to make your lessons R.A.S. selected:

• Walk backwards into and around the room before beginning a discussion about negative numbers 
• Put on a “thinking cap” to indicate that what comes next is very important 
• Show a book trailer to stimulate interest in a novel before reading it. 
• Use color-coded highlighters for labeling key words, important points, etc. 
• Set up a think-pair-share or a jigsaw so students know they will be doing something with information they gain during a reading/listening activity 
• Start with a current or local event – anything that promotes “buy-in” 
• Alert students to information that connects with their personally valued goals 

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The Amygdala responds to interest, relevance, and pleasure. Students (or people) who are in a positive emotional state have an open amygdala leading directly to the prefrontal cortex, where long-term memory resides. Students who are stressed have no passage to the prefrontal cortex. Brain scans show a direct path to the prefrontal cortex during a happy state and no activation of the passage to the prefrontal cortex during sadness, anger, or fear.

Causes of school stress include

• Being embarrassed to read aloud 
• Anxiety about taking tests 
• Physical and language differences 
• Bullying and cliques 
• Frustration with material that is too difficult – zone of proximal development 
• Boredom - many children have been robbed of the joy of successful learning because of boredom caused by teach-to-the-test rote memorization. 

The greatest fear reported by students is making a mistake in a whole-class setting. Supportive classrooms are those where students feel safe enough to take the risk of participating and being “smart”...and even risk making mistakes! 

Inquiry is de-stressing.

• It builds a classroom learning community that invites participation by all students. 
• It connects with prior knowledge. 
• It invites pleasurable engagement through prediction. 
• It provides learning practice where students learn to use their reflective rather than reactive brain networks. 

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The Dopamine response is inspiration, motivation, curiosity, creativity, persistence, and perseverance. Dopamine is released when we are given choices as well as when we are moving, collaborating, enjoying music, and feeling self-appreciation. The results are acting kindly, interacting well with friends, expressing gratitude, and feeling optimistic.

Choice = ownership on the part of the learner 

Group learning increases dopamine and builds pleasure-associated memories. 

Acetylcholine Bonus – When dopamine levels are high, acetylcholine is released and “...by enhancing the response to sensory input, high levels of acetylcholine enhance attention to the environment...by enhancing the response to external input, high levels of acetylcholine enhance the encoding of memory for specific stimuli, allowing more effective and accurate encoding of sensory events.” ~Michael E. Hasselmo & Jill McGaughy, Dept. of Psychology, Center for Memory and Brain, Boston University

Consolidation occurs in the hippocampus, where new information is encoded with previously stored related knowledge:

If it is isolated, 

it isn’t consolidated. 

It MUST be related! 

Patterning is matching prior knowledge to new information to encode new memory. Long-term memories are made through pattern construction in the brain – Piaget’s “schema” are mental maps or categories of knowledge that grow through pattern association. Good inquiries don’t have a simple, single answer (just like real life) - they encourage students to recognize and build patterns, thus connecting new information into their brains’ neural wiring. 

II. Unless something is done with a new memory, it is lost in less than a minute. Relational memories are turned into understanding (and stored in long-term memory) by mental manipulation in the prefrontal cortex. 

John Dewey said, “We don’t learn from experience, 

we learn by reflecting on it.” 

“Dend-writes” for mental manipulation 

• Draw a picture, diagram, or graphic organizer of what you learned. 
• React to the most surprising thing you learned today. 
• Reflect on how something you learned connects to something you already knew. 
• Predict what will come next. 
• Make a note of what is still confusing to you. 
• Write about a new/better understanding that you have. 
• Describe a strategy you used to solve a problem today. 
• Describe a “so what” – the one thing you’ll remember most about today’s lesson. 
• Write about how this lesson connects to things you learn in other subjects. 
• Compare/contrast, categorize, or summarize an aspect of the lesson. 
• Create an analogy that explains what this lesson reminded you about or how it fits with what you already knew. 

You can use your students’ dend-writes to:

• Know how accurately the lesson was understood 
• Correct any misperceptions at the next class meeting 
• Ask students whose responses were especially good to share those insights with the class as review or to promote discussion. 
• Post good responses as “back-pats” 

III. Inquiry-centered learning builds reasoning skills or “executive functions.” The prefrontal cortex is only about 15% of the brain’s volume; we have to make it count! Our goal is to turn information into usable, transferable knowledge. 

The brain’s executive functions include

• Judgment 
• Prioritizing 
• Analyzing information 
• Decision making 
• Goal planning 
• Organizing 
• Inferring 
• Synthesizing 
• Integrating 
• Problem-solving 

Call it HOTS, critical thinking, or whatever you like...this is our goal!

More Common Core Writing Practice at the New York Times

For your own best practices, here are two recent Common Core Practice Writing Tasks from The Learning Network at The New York Times.

An argumentative writing task about the late "technology wunderkind," Aaron Swartz: A Data Crusader, a Defendant and Now, a Cause.

Michael Francis McElroy/The New York Times

A narrative writing task about Richard Blanco, the son of Cuban exiles who was the 2013 inaugural poet: Poet's Kinship with the President.

Craig Dilger for The New York Times

I highly recommend not only these tasks, but also that you check out the Common Core Practice that appears each Friday on The Learning Network's page! And, as always, I ask that you leave a comment if you use Sarah Gross and Jonathan Olsen's great ideas.