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!

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!

Common Core Resources for ELLs at Colorín Colorado

I have great news for anyone who teaches English Learners, via Lesli A. Maxwell at Education Week. In a blog post yesterday, she reported that Colorín Colorado has added a wonderful new CCSS resource for teachers of ELLs. Lesli had previously reported about the work that Albuquerque, N. M., teachers were doing to "ensure that the district's large number of English-learners would not be left to languish under the more demanding requirements of the common core." Now she reports that "anyone can see the full lesson plans those teachers created, videos of them teaching in the classroom, and interviews of them talking about how it worked." Lessons created by teachers, for teachers? Bravo!

And another "Bravo!" to Colorín Colorado. As an ESL teacher I consulted this amazing website often, and it's no surprise that these resources are now available here. In addition to the work done by the Albuquerque teachers, you'll find information for teachers who "might be trying to figure out what their role in supporting students and content teachers should be in the common-core era" as well as parent resources.

Hurry over and see what you can use, and enjoy the work of teachers who are willing to share - the BEST kind! 

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!

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.

Lit2Go - FREE Audio Books

From Aesop's Fables to The Velveteen Rabbit, with Dracula, Jane Eyre, and Tom Sawyer in between, you'll be amazed at the number of FREE audio books you'll find at Lit2Go, an ongoing project of the Florida Center for Instructional Technology.

"Lit2Go is a free online collection of stories and poems in Mp3 (audiobook) format. An abstract, citation, playing time, and word count are given for each of the passages. Many of the passages also have a related reading strategy identified. Each reading passage can also be downloaded as a PDF and printed for use as a read-along or as supplemental reading material for your classroom."

Frankenstein

Around the World in 80 Days

The Invisible Man

Try playing these classics for your students during read-aloud time, and watch them start to appreciate books that haven't exactly been flying off your library shelves!

Storyline Online, from the Screen Actors Guild

How would you like to have 25 FREE read-alouds for your students to enjoy? What if all 25 of them were GREAT children's books? And if the readers were people like James Earl Jones or Jane Kaczmarek, or perhaps Ernest Borgnine or Annette Bening?

If this sounds amazing, then you are in luck! 

The Screen Actors Guild Foundation provides this great resource via YouTube or, for those whose systems block the site, via SchoolTube's Storyline Online channel. 

Here's Betty White reading Gene Zion's classic Harry the Dirty Dog:

As if the videos weren't enough, Storyline Online also provides a downloadable activity guide for each book that includes questions, suggested research extensions, internet activities, and biographical information about the author, illustrator, and reader, plus more book suggestions.

I know you'll enjoy all this site has to offer you and your kiddos!

Building Academic Vocabulary

I just might have mentioned before that I love Ireland's NBSS site. There are actually many reasons to love it, but as a teacher, I especially love two things. One is the organization's understanding that academics and behavior are tightly interwoven. The second is that it provides truly great teaching strategies; not only are students' needs considered, but teacher support is also a focus.

Today we'll look at their collection of Academic Vocabulary Building Activities & Strategies. Every teacher knows that a student must be able to understand and use the vocabulary of learning in order to succeed in any content area. Our students need a deep knowledge of these words in order to "access information about them from memory as they read" and we must explicitly teach both academic words and strategies for learning new ones that they encounter.

You will appreciate the explanation of Robert Marzano's six steps to effective vocabulary instruction, and the suggested methods of implementing each one: 

• The teacher gives a friendly, informal description, explanation or example of the new vocabulary term.
• Students give a description, explanation or example of the new term in his/her own words.
• Students create a non linguistic representation of the word.
• Students engage in activities to deepen their knowledge of the new word. 
• Students discuss the new word with one another.
• Students play games to reinforce and review new vocabulary. 

You'll love even more the thirty-three vocabulary Graphic Organizers provided for your students with so many different activities that they'll never get tired of them! Here's a sneak peek of some of my favorites:

   

NBSS provides links to six Useful Websites for Vocabulary Activities such as Visuwords and Triptico, that have fabulous vocabulary activities for your kiddos.

      

Last, but certainly not least, are Games for Learning. From Charades to Pictionary to Taboo to Wordo, you'll find instructions, templates, and links to sites that allow you to create your own puzzles tailored to your students' needs.

Convinced? I thought you would be. Enjoy this great resource and see how much difference it can make for your students' essential academic vocabularies!

Common Core Practice | Life on a Coastline

The focus of all three of this week's writing tasks at The Learning Network? Living on a coastline, and the impact it can have on the lives of its residents. One of the writing tasks is informative, one is narrative, and one argumentative, providing plenty of variety for your students, even though the locations have their similarities.

After reading "Hopes of Home Fade Among Japan's Displaced," students are asked to compare the March 2011 tsunami and the resulting Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant meltdown to a natural disaster with which they are familiar.

The writing task for "Salvaging at the Shore, or Just Remembering" is to "write a narrative that includes figurative language and sensory details, (describing) what 'home' means to you."

The final task, an argumentative one, asks students to examine an op-ed piece, "Good Neighbors, Bad Border," and write a paragraph arguing who should be given possession of Machias Island and North Rock, tiny islands in the Gulf of Maine, whose ownership has been in questions for 230 years.

As always, I ask that you post a comment to Sarah Gross, Jonathan Olsen, and their partners at The New York Times if you use one of their prompts, thanking them for sharing!

Cures for the Common Core Blues: BOOKS, Vol. 5

I'm a bit behind on this series because our son, daughter-in-law, and grandbabies who live in Tanzania arrived in the states last week for a visit. Oh, and we had a booth selling crafts made there by Holly and her Tanzanian friend Suzy at the local Arts and Craft Fair for three days...a busy and joyful week!

Today I want to share a book by one of my favorite authors, Leo Lionni. Having taught high school for 25 years, I came late to his wonderful writing, learning to love it during the 7 years I taught elementary ESL. 

Inch by Inch was the first of Lionni's books to win the Caldecott Honor, with three more following. It's a fantastic book for integrating measurement skills; Scholastic has a lesson plan on this page. Not only is the prose wonderful; his illustrations are as well. The iconic Horn Book Magazine praises the book's “...lovely colors...sharp definition of cutouts against white space...rhythm of the composition...simplicity of the whole...” 

Weston Woods produced an animated version of the book in 2006, which costs $59.95, but ArtsEdge has a story performance, by Mermaid Theatre of Nova Scotia, online and FREE!

You and your young friends can read more about Leo on Random House's website, which provides tons of information for an author study - seven short chapters and an essay written by his granddaughter Annie Lionni. Your students can also 

• watch him explain why he writes books about animals in a short video,
• see how he makes a paper mouse(and try one themselves) here,
• learn about his childhood and his imagination in this video,
• see many pictures, including one of him playing his accordion!

I have other favorite Lionni books (he wrote 40!) that I'll share later, but in the meantime, please let Inch by Inch and Leo's personal story help cure your Common Core blues.

I hope you're having a happy Thanksgiving week; many blessings from my family to yours! 

Common Core Practice | Bad Reviews, Elite Schools and Facebook Fakes

Do all of your students understand different types of questions? Is their questioning effective? Would you like to have a tool that would help them understand rhetorical questioning as a device for proving a point?

If so, one of this week's Common Core Practice writing tasks at The Learning Network is tailor-made for you! Sarah Gross and Jonathan Olsen's students loved Pete Wells’s less-than-stellar review of Guy’s American Kitchen & Bar, with one of them declaring, "This is the best article we've read this year."

The task that references this article asks students to write a letter expressing annoyance or disappointment through a series of rhetorical questions.

The second task is argumentative: students are asked to read an editorial about admissions procedures at a group of highly-selective high schools in New York City. "After reading the editorial, answer the following two questions in a paragraph each. Try to connect the two paragraphs using transitions. A) How should highly selective high schools select students? B) What do you think are the most accurate predictors of high school success?"

This week's final task, also argumentative, refers to people who set up fake Facebook accounts in order to hide their identity, and asks the question: "Do you think it is ethical for high school and college students to create a Facebook profile using a pseudonym, despite the fact the company expressly prohibits it in their Terms of Service? Explain your opinion in one paragraph."

Thanks again to Sarah Gross, Jonathan Olsen, and their students, for these great writing tasks connected to articles in the New York Times!

Reading Strategies and Bookmarks - Great Idea!

Today we revisit a site from a previous post, Great Resources From Ireland's NBSS, to look at some very cool bookmarks - but not just any bookmarks. These have purpose...wait, make that six purposes!

I visualize teaching a strategy, making a great anchor chart using the bookmark as a starter for organizing it, and giving each student a bookmark to keep in the books you are using to practice the strategy. Click on the image below to go to the pdf document and print it. There are three bookmarks per page, which you can print on card stock or mount on colored paper and laminate. (See if your kiddos notice the different spelling, using "s" rather than "z".) 

Addressing "key comprehension strategies - making connections, self-questioning, visualising, inferring, determining importance, summarising/synthesising and self-monitoring comprehension - can help students become more purposeful, active readers and learners."  

We all need to be more purposeful, active readers and learners. Enjoy this great tool!

Common Core Resources: RAFT Writing Strategy

"The more often students write, the more proficient they become as writers." 

Not only is this true, but writing with proficiency and sophistication is demanded in the Common Core State Standards.

From the CCSS Writing Standards K-5 and 6-12: "Each year in their writing, students should demonstrate increasing sophistication in all aspects of language use, from vocabulary and syntax to the development and organization of ideas, and they should address increasingly demanding content and sources."

If you teach writing and aren't already a fan, hustle over to the website ReadWriteThink.org, a joint venture of three great organizations:

  

One of the many resources you'll find there is a guide to using the RAFT Writing Strategy, which is designed to help a student understand his role and effectively communicate his ideas, and to focus on his audience, format, and topic.

Deborah Dean's book Strategic Writing is referenced, as is Project CRISS: Creating Independence through Student-owned Strategies, by Santa, Havens, and Valdes.   

So, what does RAFT represent?

R stands for “Role” – What is the writer’s role? (Ex: news reporter)
A stands for “Audience” - Who is the writer’s audience? (Ex: people in the community)
F stands for “Format” - How should the writer present the information? (Ex: news article)
T stands for “Topic” - What is the author writing about? (Ex: recent election)

ReadWriteThink offers several examples of the strategy in practice; here are two favorites of mine:

• Decide on an area of study currently taking place in your classroom for which you could collaborate with the students and write a class RAFT. Discuss with your students the basic premise of the content for which you’d like to write, but allow students to help you pick the role, audience, format, and topic to write about. 
• Have a class think-aloud to come up with ideas for the piece of writing that you will create as a group. Model on a whiteboard, overhead projector, or chart paper how you would write in response to the prompt. Allow student input and creativity as you craft your piece of writing.

Modeling is invaluable for teaching in any discipline; I am convinced that it builds confidence that many students need before they can even begin to write effectively.

There are seven lesson plans provided, from grades 3 - 12. I especially like the Raft Writing Template, a graphic organizer, to use as a starting point:

Enjoy using the RAFT strategy, as you work with your kiddos to help them become not just proficient, but great writers!

Common Core Practice | Chickens, Clouds and the View Outside Your Window

I hope you're using the super writing practice prompts that The Learning Network at The New York Times shares most Fridays. They are so diverse that there's something for almost everyone. And for each task, designed and tested by teachers Sarah Gross and Jonathan Olsen and their ninth-grade humanities students at High Technology High School in Lincroft, N.J, you'll find suggested preparatory activities and extensions!

This week, your students can:

• read and then write an argumentative essay about chickens living in a community garden in Brooklyn, and nearby residents' reactions. 

         

• write a descriptive paragraph, using figurative language and sensory details, after reading Finding Zen in a Patch of Nature. ATTENTION, Tennessee teachers: Dr. David Haskell, an ecologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of the South in Sewanee, is the subject of this article by James Gorman!

• write an informative summary, including at least one direct quote from the article Gleaning Clues on Sunny Days From the Clouds. 

All great ideas based on informational text from the Times, for your students' Common Core writing practice!

Coraline. The book. On video. Free!

"When Coraline steps through a door to find another house 

strangely similar to her own (only better), things seem 

marvelous. But there’s another mother there, and another 

father, and they want her to stay and be their little girl. 

They want to change her and never let her go. 

Coraline will have to fight with all her wit and courage 

if she is to save herself and return to her ordinary life."

Good news for fans of Neil Gaiman's Coraline! To celebrate the 10th anniversary of his #1 New York Times bestseller, Neil Gaiman is posting readings of each chapter of Coraline on his official website for young readers, Mr. Bobo's Remarkable Mouse Circus.

Gaiman himself reads Chapter 1, Lemony Snicket reads Chapter 2, and Gaiman's "fairy goddaughter" Natashya Hawley reads Chapter 3. Chapters 4 through 11 are online now, read by such luminaries as John Hodgman, Melissa Mars, Holly Black, and R.L. Stine.

Gaiman was born in the U.K. and now lives near Minneapolis. He is a lifelong "devourer of books" who began his writing career as a journalist. I love this introduction of his biography on the website:

"Sometimes, when he was smaller, people used to tell Neil Gaiman not to make things up. He never listened. Now he’s written over twenty books, been given dozens of awards, many of them astonishingly ugly. He’s written television drama and for movies, and for comics. He’s even written “non-fiction” which he learned is only marginally less made-up than the fiction. Sometimes he thinks about finding some of those people who warned him of all the awful things that would happen if he kept making things up, and finding out if it’s happened yet, or is still going to happen, and whether he should buy a tin hat and thick boots for protection. In the meantime, he grows pumpkins and keeps on making things up."

Coraline was awarded the 2003 Hugo Award for Best Novella, the 2003 Nebula Award for Best Novella, and the 2002 Bram Stoker Award for Best Work for Young Readers. The 10th Anniversary Edition of the book features a new foreword from the author, a reader's guide, and an author Q&A.

In 2009, the book was adapted by Henry Selick into an animated film of the same name, which is now available on DVD.