The SIFT Method for Literature Analysis

I've written about Teaching Channel before, and I'll be writing from time to time about a particular great idea I've found there. If you haven't already joined, remember that it's FREE, and signing up takes less than a minute!

One of the many great Tch video clips shows middle school teacher Meagan Berkowitz teaching a poetry lesson using the SIFT Method - Symbol, Imagery, Figurative Language, and Tone or Theme. It's less than 5 minutes long, and well worth watching to see her interaction with her students, and the focus they have on the poems they are reading while using bookmark cue cards. Close analytic reading is an important feature of the Common Core; here's a tool for you to try out to see if it fits your needs!

Besides the bookmark, you are given the lesson plan, a copy of  the two poems used, and a transcript of the lesson. If you're a language arts teacher, you're all set to try this lesson yourself, or to adapt it to your grade level! And don't forget to "pin" the lesson  by clicking "Save this in my Lesson Planner."

(A note: there is a typo on the SIFT bookmark that you'll want to change before printing - "attitude and author" should be "attitude an author." I changed it in the image above. Since it's an open Word document, it's no problem!)

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Also, I'd love to hear from you, so leave comments telling me how you're using resources or making suggestions. Share with your colleagues and friends, too, please!

Thanks, and have a great weekend! :)

Common Core Math Vocabulary Cards

Once upon a time, when math textbooks were essentially bound sets of worksheets, little emphasis was placed on math vocabulary. In elementary school, if you knew the meaning of words like multiply, decimal, and divisor, all was well. Math vocabulary grew in high school algebra and geometry, but there wasn't much deliberate teaching of academic language, in math or in any other content area.

Robert Marzano and others researchers recognized the need for effective, deliberate vocabulary instruction, emphasizing academic vocabulary. My work with English Learners brought this need home to me, since interpersonal communication is so different from academic language. Tennessee stepped up and created an Academic Vocabulary list with Dr. Marzano's guidance in 2006; I was privileged to work on the project in science.

In 2012, Tennessee's implementation of the vocabulary-dense Common Core standards demands effective teaching of academic language, and most teachers are looking for the best way to do so, having long-since let go of glossary definitions and vocabulary quizzes. (Thank goodness!)

“Only confusion will result when the name is demanded before the idea is mastered. Definitions alone rarely throw much light on the ideas they represent. They are usually the end product of much exploration and careful thought.”

Joan Countryman, Writing to Learn Mathematics, 1992

Granite School District in Utah is serious about students' academic vocabulary acquisition, and they have prepared some of the best resources I've seen. You will find:

• math vocabulary lists by grade (including secondary)
• a PowerPoint presentation about effective vocabulary instruction
• templates for analogies, comparing terms, vocabulary journals, word walls, and more!

My personal favorites are the vocabulary cards for all grades. Each set of gorgeous cards begins with an instruction sheet for the teacher, and each card has three sections (except for the kindergarten cards.) The first is the word only, the second includes a graphic representation, and the third also includes a definition. The uses for each are explained. Here is a 6th grade example:



Print the cards for your grade or subject, separate into sections, laminate, and you will have manipulatives for your essential vocabulary to use over and over. You'll be glad you did!



Welcome-Back-to-School Book Lists

In Warren County, TN, where I taught for 28 years, today is the FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL! I shared in the excitement of that day for a long time, and I heard it in our teacher-daughter's voice as we chatted this morning. She has lots planned for the day, and I know that part of it involves books. She has always been an avid reader, as have our sons, and I've mentioned her book blog before. But what if your students or your own children need encouragement to read? What if they just haven't quite found books they love?

As promised, I'm sharing one feature of James Patterson's ReadKiddoRead today. On the Lists page you will find

• Almost Can't-Miss Sure Shot Books for Boys
• Almost Can't-Miss Sure Shot Books for Girls
• Best Books of the Decade
• Ultimate Summer Reading
• and more!

Especially for back-to-school, Judy Freeman, reader, writer, and story-teller, has compiled two lists of books about the school experience, one for younger readers and one for older ones. The lists are annotated and include suggested activities for parents and teachers. You're going to love it, and I think your kiddos will, too!

Whether it's today or coming soon, have a wonderful FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL!

NatGeo Map Maker Kits - NOT Just for Geography!

It didn't take long for my teaching partner and me to discover that our students knew very little geography. As we read multicultural books and used them to teach vocabulary, writing, etc., we began to make extensive use of our classroom globe and maps. We discovered that a large laminated map taped to the table made for rich discussions and great hands-on opportunities for our students. A collection of money from various countries piqued the kids' interest, as did a set of state quarters. The students enjoyed placing the money on the correct spot on the map, and thought of it as a game. We used dry-erase markers to write directly on the map when appropriate, which they loved.

Some of our table maps came from past issues of National Geographic; others we found online, printed in sections, and taped together. BTW, in addition to being possibly the classiest magazine in the world, National Geographic has an amazing website, a vast and fabulous resource for teachers. You will find more there than you could ever believe for every grade and every subject, NOT just geography.

But this post is about maps, so here it is: NatGeo Map Maker allows you to download, print, and assemble huge maps for your classroom - the World (both political and physical), the Americas, Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia and Oceania, the United States, and Polar Regions. A tutorial provides helpful hints on laminating, etc. Isn't this pic from the NatGeo site awesome?

http://education.nationalgeographic.com/education/mapping/?ar_a=1

I'm imagining uses that are completely cross-curricular: Reading/Language Arts (as we used our maps in our ESL classroom), Science for ecosystems (and much more), Math for measurements (and yes, much more), and of course, Social Studies. How can you make use of this incredible resource in your curriculum? Enjoy!

Common Core Math Posters

Being part of a family of teachers is wonderful! My mother-in-law (years before I married her son) was my 8th grade math teacher who modeled professionalism and being the best teacher you can be. I've mentioned my daughter and her great ideas in previous posts. Today I'm sharing a website that my nephew, a middle school math teacher, shared with me last weekend. 

Jordan School District in Utah has developed and posted online an amazing set of 32 posters to enlarge and print for your classroom. You and your students can refer to them as you explore the Common Core Mathematical Practices Standards.

Here's a preview - the poster for Mathematical Practice Standard 1 for 4th & 5th grades:

Hover over the Teachers tab and click on your grade to see the entire set. Posters aren't all you'll find there, though. If you look at the Scope and Sequence charts, some of which are still in draft form, you will see "I Can" statements that you can use instead of creating your own. What a great FREE resource - thank you, Jordan School District!

Favorite Picture Books

By request from a missionary mom who homeschools her girls in Tanzania, I'm listing some favorite books today. Remember, this is not a list of "best books for children," but simply some of the picture books I personally love!

Verna Aardema
•         Bringing the Rain to Kapiti Plain
•         Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People's Ears

Alma Flor Ada
•         I Love Saturdays y domingos
•         My Name is María Isabel

Eric Carle
•         Brown Bear, Brown Bear
•         Mister Seahorse
•         Papa, Please Get the Moon For Me
•         The Mixed Up Chameleon
•         The Very Hungry Caterpillar

Carmen Agra Deedy
•         The Library Dragon

Arthur Dorros
•         Abuela
•         Isla

Keiko Kasza
•         My Lucky Day
•         The Wolf's Chicken Stew

Leo Lionni
•         A Color of His Own
•         Fish is Fish
•         Inch by Inch
•         It's Mine
•         Swimmy

Mercer Mayer
•         There's an Alligator Under My Bed
•         There's Something in My Attic

Patricia McKissack
•         Goin' Someplace Special

Pat Mora
•         Pablo's Tree
•         Tomás and the Library Lady

Patricia Polacco
•         Appelemando's Dream
•         Chicken Sunday
•         John Philip Duck
•         Just Plain Fancy
•         Meteor
•         Mr. Lincoln's Way
•         My Ol' Man
•         Picnic at Mudsock Meadow
•         Pink and Say
•         Rechenka's Eggs
•         Someone for Mr. Sussman
•         Something About Hensley's
•         Thank You, Mr. Falker
•         The Bee Tree
•         The Junkyard Wonders
•         The Keeping Quilt
•         Thunder Cake
•         When Lightning Comes in a Jar

Margot Theis Raven
•         Night Boat to Freedom

Judy Schachner
•         SkippyJon Jones Series

Maurice Sendak
•         Where the Wild Things Are

Gary Soto
•         Chato and the Party Animals
•         Chato's Kitchen

Deborah Wiles
•         Freedom Summer

Teaching and Learning With Picture Books

"I don't wanna grow up..." but not so much because of Toys R Us. No, I'm holding on for picture books! Reading them to my grands, yes, but even more, creating lessons to use in the classroom and seeing my students "get it" because of them.

Last year, many of the lessons I taught were based on authentic children's literature. The reading, writing, listening, and speaking components of the Tennessee ESL Curriculum were interwoven into each class while the kiddos enjoyed rich stories by amazing authors such as Patricia Polacco, one of their favorites. Their vocabulary grew by leaps and bounds, and because they cared about the characters, their writing assignments showed comprehension far beyond their actual reading level. Months after studying a particular book, they were able to recall details that even I might have forgotten, and often would bring them up on their own...happy, happy teacher!

I'll be posting about favorite Polacco books (and others) from time to time, but today I just want to give you a link to an absolutely phenomenal resource:

Using Picture Books to Introduce or Teach Skills is a sixty-five page list of picture books to use in teaching math, science, social studies, and yes, language arts skills. I hope to meet Missouri librarian Jana Starnes one day so I can thank her properly for her amazing work (though I did send her a thank you email today). The list is indexed by subject and topic, and also by book title. It is copyrighted, but shared online. What a woman!

You probably have many of these books in your classroom or school library. If not, don't forget McKay Books, or your friends down the hall. Have fun planning great ways to use them!

Common Core E/LA Templates

Tulare County, CA has Sequoia National Park, Mount Whitney, and Kings Canyon National Park. I want to go and see it all!

This post, however, is about the amazing work that has been done by their Office of Education in compiling a vast set of resources for implementing the English & Language Arts Common Core State Standards. Dr. Lori Digisi reminded us at a recent statewide TAS meeting that as educators, we should not reinvent the wheel, but rather find the work that others have done already and build on it. My very-smart-teacher daughter found this amazing site, and I invite you to start building!

Joanna says that the templates found on this page are the best Common Core resource she has discovered thus far as a Reading & LA teacher. After clicking on the link, you simply have to scroll down the page to "ELA CCCSS Templates" and select your grade level. The templates include vocabulary, question stems, and a place to write teaching strategies and notes. Here is the page for 3rd Grade Standard 1:

http://www.tcoe.org/ERS/CCSS/ELA/Templates_03.pdf

Unfortunately, TCOE hasn't made as much progress in Math, but I'm hoping one of my blog readers will point me to a resource like this one, so I can pass it along. In the meantime, I'll be hunting, too.

We Give Books

A quick morning post about a really cool website: We Give Books is an initiative of the Pearson Foundation. More than 200 books, both fiction and nonfiction, are available to read online, and it's all FREE! True, it's a marketing tool for Pearson's publishing companies, but free is free, right?

         

I can imagine the site's being used at a reading center in the classroom, and by the way, there are reading extension activities linked to the CCSS provided, as well as some learning guides, craft ideas, and an interesting-looking Children's Literature Review Blogging Project. How could you use it in your class?

ReadKiddoRead!

James Patterson writes thrillers, and that's not all. He is the best-selling author in the world, with more than 250 million copies sold worldwide. Some of his books became feature films (Kiss the Girls and Along Came a Spider) and others became made-for-TV movies.

Why is he the subject of a post on an education blog? For one thing, he is also the author of several young adult novels, including the fantasy/thriller Maximum Ride series. Max, the fifth book in the series, won him the Children's Choice Book Award for Author of the Year in 2010, and he was a finalist in 2012 for Middle School, The Worst Years of My Life. This guy, who retired from advertising in 1996 and became a writing machine, has two English degrees, a B.A.from Manhattan College and an M.A. from Vanderbilt University, not too shabby.

Again, though, I saved the best for last: ReadKiddoRead is Patterson's initiative "dedicated to making kids readers for life." There you'll find videos, lists of suggested books by level and genre, suggestions for lesson plans, discussion groups, and SO much more - too much more for this post. I'll be dedicating some future posts to specific features of this amazing website, but you have it now, so you can begin exploring on your own!

Here's one thing that we would ALL love:

ReadKiddoRead gives away a box of his books to 25 high school and 25 middle school libraries every month. Anyone can enter, and if you don't win this month, you can enter again next month. I couldn't find any schools from Tennessee on the winners' map, so you be the first!

Now you understand why James Patterson is worthy of a post on an education blog, right?

Teach With Movies

Using Hollywood movies in class is great for capturing your students' interest, but it can be labor-intensive to find the ones that are best for specific lessons.

Teach With Movies has Learning Guides based on more than 350 feature films, with 12 indexes for finding just the right one for your curriculum area.

This resource isn't free, but it only costs $11.99 for a one-year subscription. And it could save you lots of time, which is money after all, right?

Teaching Channel - Pinterest for Teachers, But Better

Back in the day (say the late 1980s), there were filmstrips and old reel-to-reel films, but teaching videos? Not so much. Flash forward to the early 2000s, and my librarian best friends had amassed hundreds of VHS tapes and indexed them for our faculty. We were rich!

Now here we are in 2012, with YouTube, TeacherTube, and Gaggle, oh, my! Gaggle even has a "my videos" button, but sadly, not every school system has a Gaggle subscription for its teachers. 

Enter Teaching Channel, which features videos of lesson ideas in addition to exemplary lessons and strategies:

• "Teaching Channel is a video showcase -- on the Internet and TV -- of innovative and effective teaching practices in America's schools."
• "Videos labeled 'Lesson Idea Common Core' are Common Core aligned."
•  It's my favorite price - free!

All good, right? Well, I saved THE (absolute) BEST for last. Once you register for your free Tch account, click on the Workspace tab, and choose Lesson Planner from the My Workspace menu, you can

The Button enables you to "pin" not only videos and ideas from the Teaching Channel website, but also those you find anywhere on the web! I just pinned this great 2-minute video from Tch :
https://www.teachingchannel.org/videos/classroom-silent-communication-signals?fd=1 
AND
this one from YouTube, an animation of one of my favorite children's books, Swimmy by Leo Lionni: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=442ie2qFANQ

Simply amazing!!!

The Horn Book

My librarian friends subscribe, as they should, to the American Library Association's publications as ALA members. Since I didn't have that resource for help in choosing great books for kids, I sometimes called or emailed them to ask for recommendations and critiques. Thanks to The Horn Book, you don't have to do that, even if you have librarian friends yourself!

You can subscribe to their print or online publications, such as The Horn Book Magazine:

OR, you can read many, many recommendations and reviews for free at their website!  A great example is their 2012 Summer Reading List. It's divided by level, from Picture Books to High School. I LOVE free, and I'll bet you do, too!

Children's Book-a-Day Almanac

Anita Silvy estimates that she has read about 125,000 children's books over the last 40 years (and I thought I had read a lot)! For 11 years, she was the editor of The Horn Book Magazine, a publication many call “the Bible of children’s literature.” Click on over to her website to read more about her life as a reader, writer, professor, publisher, and expert.


You will LOVE her Children's Book-a-Day Almanac, where she shares daily 

• Recommendations
• Stories behind the books 
• New books
• Events

You can also search the archives by age group, subject, author/illustrator, and genre. What a treasure trove for you and your kiddos!

Classroom Library Organizer

Keeping up with the books in your classroom library can be daunting! My daughter found an awesome site this summer that makes it much easier. 

Using Booksource's Classroom Organizer, you can load your books by entering ISBNs or by using a mobile app to scan them, and your students check them out by going online. It keeps up with everything, including due dates, and even prints reports (so you can see which books are checked out most, which students are using your library, etc.)!

From the website:
Classroom Organizer is a web-based program that allows users to maintain and inventory books in their classroom library. With this amazing tool you can:
- Add existing titles
- Import your student roster
- Enable students to check out and return books
- Run assessment reports on student and title activity

Update 9/1/12: Joanna has been using this in her 7th and 8th grade Reading & Language Arts classroom for the past month, and she loves it! I think you will, too!

McKay Books and Your Classroom Library

One final post on this hot Friday night. If you are a teacher, you know that your classroom library is your path into your students' reading lives. In our ESL classroom, our students actually believed that our books were "better" than the ones in the school library. My co-teacher and I made many, many trips to McKay Books to buy books that we used in lessons and for our students to check out. They were always excited to see the table of "new" books chosen just for them, and could hardly wait for their turn to read them. By the time I retired this spring, we had more than 1,000 books on our shelves. On teachers' salaries, this wouldn't have been possible without McKay. With some books as cheap as 25 cents, and many priced from 95 cents to $3.50, this warehouse stuffed with books of every kind allowed us to feed our students' desire for reading in style! You. Must. Go.

http://www.mckaybooks.com/
http://www.facebook.com/McKayUsedBooks?ref=ts

Teaching Students to Make Inferences

If you teach inferences, you need to look at this great lesson! And while you're there, subscribe to Byrdseed. While designated as a site for gifted learners, it's much more than that.

Book Trailers

Since encouraging reading is one of my passions, I want to share a great way to catch kids' interest in a new book, in a format they know well. Sell them on a book with a "preview of coming attractions" book trailer or a book talk or author interview.

http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/collection/book-videos-author-interviews-author-read-alouds-book-trailers-booktalks has many! Below is a link to one example - Scholastic's YouTube book trailer for The Strange Case of Origami Yoda by Tom Angleberger (click on his name to view his amazing website). My daughter just bought this book and its sequel, Darth Paper Strikes Back, for her middle school classroom library. She'll make some kiddos happy, for sure, and have them ready for the third book in the series, The Secret of the Fortune Wookie, due out August 7!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gM-JN6D3cAo

In my search for resources, I also found a post all about book trailers at one of Keith Schoch's blogs, Teach with Picture Books. Happy trailer hunting!

Here's my preview: My copies of The Daily 5 and The CAFE Book by "The Sisters", Gail Boushey and Joan Moser, are on their way to me at this moment. Both were highly recommended by Dr. Lori Digisi, a literacy specialist and presenter at my first statewide TAS meeting last week. The books provide a structure for increasing student ownership in their reading and a means for improved differentiated instruction. I'll post a review after I've read them.

A Worn Path

So, my daughter is a teacher. A really, really good teacher. I would like to say that I taught her everything she knows, but it wouldn't be true, even though I was her teacher (twice!) in high school. She also writes a really, really good book blog. You should definitely follow her blog if you like to read. At all.